Essential Question: What has your research shown?
Please Click here to access my paper. I did not want to fill up my blog with this long paper. It is a google doc. I did include lots of tables at the back. You don't have to read them unless you want to.
Sara,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your paper. It sounds like you had quite the adventure using Twitter in your classroom, and your results suggest that using Twitter might help students participate more and also perform better in class.
Here’s my feedback about your paper. These are things I would change, so please don’t feel like you have to do anything I suggest.
Introduction: I think it would be helpful if you state your research question as a separate question instead of just the purpose of your study. A lot of the information you included in your introduction could fit into the methodology section instead, like your second paragraph explaining the demographic of your school and classes. The last paragraph of the introduction section would be a good transition from your discussion section into your conclusion.
The paragraph where you discussed the reason for this study could also be switched to the methodology section. I found the explanation of Twitter to be hard to follow, so maybe the wording just needs to be adjusted.
Literature Review: I think your literature review is very well connected to your study and you found a lot of good research that supports your project. It was very well written and I don’t think anything needs to be changed in this section.
Methodology: Like I said, above, you could include the section of the introduction about where you teach in this section at the beginning to explain your study. I would also add an explanation of the “why” in this section as well, before discussing your data collection methods.
When discussing your data collection methods, you did a very good job explaining how you collected and analyzed your tweet data. It is a big wall of text, so maybe try to split it into a few different paragraphs. The survey could be explained a bit more in depth in this section. Maybe move some of the discussion section into this area, so readers will know more about the questions you asked and if there were any changes from the pre to the post survey. You did not discuss anything about how you analyzed the test grade data in this section and that could be useful as well. If you discuss your data collection methods more in the methodology section, you can spend more time talking about the data in the results and discussion sections.
Part 2:
ReplyDeleteResults: The tables you shared in this section were a good way of displaying data, but you should include some explanation about the data in this area too. One possibility could be to just move those tables to your discussion section instead of having a separate results section. Without any explanations, its hard to tell what you used that information for, and whether or not it was helpful to you. As a reader it is a lot easier to refer to a data table if it is on the same page as the section that discusses it.
Discussion: I liked that you started your discussion by talking about the “Twitter battle”. The next paragraph about introducing Twitter to your students could fit very nicely into the methodology section where you talked about the pre/post surveys. It gives the reader an idea about what you asked students, and shows how you analyzed that data as well. The rest of the discussion looks pretty good. I would add the results data tables into this section so you can see the data as you talk about it. The last paragraph of the discussion section could go into the conclusion section to help transition from discussion to conclusion.
Conclusion: I would talk about your original research question again at this point and talk about why you changed questions here, instead of in the introduction. You could talk about that in the discussion section as well. I liked that you talked about continuing this in the future. Do you think you would change anything if you did it again? This would be a good place to talk about that.
Using the Rubric provided to us in the syllabus:
I would give you an Acceptable (19-13 pts) for the first standard, 3c, only because you didn’t explicitly state the research question.
I would give you a Target (25-20 pts) for standard 2f because your literature review was very well done.
I would give you a Needs Improvement (12 pts and under) for standard 2h because you shared data in the results section without any text explanation in the same area. If you can integrate the data tables and explanations together, you should be good to go.
I would give you an Acceptable (19-13 pts) on standard 2g because there wasn’t much explanation of the data in the appendices. I was not clear about the codes you used in Appendix B, so I would identify those again in the appendix.
I hope I didn’t come off as too critical. I really did enjoy reading your paper and can’t wait to see your final presentation next week! Nice job on your data collection, too. I can’t imagine how much time you must have put into sorting all of those tweets!
Sara-
ReplyDeleteStandard 3C- I would give you target. I thought you did a great job on the literature review and you had the research question you were looking for How does Twitter affect quiet students?, Does it help to achieve at a higher level?
Standard 2F- I would say target. You showed the resources, showed the benefits of using Twitter, concerns, and positive notes when used effectively.
Standard 2h- I would give you acceptable because some of the charts were confusing to me.
Standard 2g- I would give needs improvement because some of the charts were not clear to me. I didn’t understand the initials. What was the test out of 100 points? 50 points? Are those score for one student?
I thought you did a great job! Just a few parts were confusing to me. Like the class that used Twitter raised by 6%. How many students are in that class? I thought you had a great introduction, I felt like I was in your shoes and have been. You wrote,”I used Twitter only in one class, in my biology class, and not in my physical science class. There are about 20 students in each class. 9 of these students are in both biology and physical science, and I focused my data collection on these 9 students.” So my question is did this 9 student use twitter in both classes? I think that is just a little confusing for me. That is interesting the scores went up after using twitter. Nice job!