Traditional Research
Traditional research is conducted under a linear, systematic process, which always done by the teachers in educational organizations.
Action Research
Action research is conducted under a cyclical systematic process, which can be conducted in any organizations by no matter teachers, administrators, or counselors.
Process of Conducting Action Research
1. Identifying and limiting the topic
2.Gathering information
3.Reviewing the related literature
4. Developing the plan and collecting data
5. Impleting the plan and collecting data
6.Analyzing the data
7.Developing an action plan
8.Sharing and communicating the results
9.Reflecting on the process
Methods of data collection
Qualitative data
Qualitative data are narrative, appearing primarily as words, and usually collected through observations, interviews, or journals or by obtaining existing documents or records.
Quantitative data
Quantitative data are numerical and include just about anything that can be counted, tallied, or rated.
Data analysis
Qualitative data analysis: Inductive process, involving the reduction of information that has been collected by organizing it into important themes ans patterns.
Quantitative data analysis: Deductive process, using descriptive or inferential statistics.
My project
The topic of my research is "8th Grade Student’s Performance and Perceptions In a Flipped Math Classroom", which was a group work. The research we are conducting in this study is to compare the traditional format instruction and the flipped format instruction, also get the idea of the learners perception of this kind of instruction.
According to the topic that Rousseau & Tam (1996) mentioned, which infers that that a research problem should be realistic or exist. As this research we are conducting, we accessed to a factual class and collected the valid data. As (Hubbard & Power, 2003) mentioned, a research topic would not be too broad or too vague, the research may be overwhelmed with too many variations when doing data collection. Thus, our research questions are: How do 8th grade students perceive the flipped classroom? Does the flipped classroom affect student’s academic performance?
While choosing between qualitative and quantitative research designs provides numerous options, many action research studies tend to align" better with mixed- methods research designs. (Mertler, Craig A. 2013). In this case, we chose to use the mixed methods. We used test scores of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 from to evaluate the efficiency of flipped classroom. The test scores are from the math classes by examining two groups of 8th-grade student. The first group consists of students who have used a flipped classroom instructional methodology. The second group has been taught in the traditional manner. After three months of applying the two different methodologies, there will be a survey with open-ended questions to assess the student satisfaction in the first group. Also, we are going to compare the first group chapter test scores(flipped classroom) to the second group(traditional classroom) in order to show the flipped classroom’s impact.
As for the data collection, we applied both quantitative method and qualitative method. In quantitative method, we analyzed chapter scores from students to assess the performance. In qualitative data collection, we created an online survey in Google form to assess the students satisfaction, and the questions were open-ended.
Link of my project:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RgLaYpubCMi6KkAQpbtKBcFDoYsvHUCSmcVbKqE37t4/edit?usp=sharing
My project in ETEC 643
I conducted a research on the reading-motivation and perceptions of Chinese people of using Wechat e-book reading app in order to evaluate the efficacy of this reading app. Wechat reading app is an e-book reading app based on the the social media app Wechat. The biggest feature in Wechat reading app is the social network element, which is the unique feature that distinct from the other e-book reading app or e-book reading devices. Thus, this research is to find out whether the social network feature could motivate readers reading interest or not. This research used mixed method to collect the data and both descriptive and inferential statistics to analyze the data. The result show that there is no strong relationship between the readers characters and the readers perspective to the reading app. However, the reading hours of using Wechat app are increased than reading with printed books.
Reflection in ETEC 643
In this course, I gained lots of information than the basic research class. From the data collection to the data analysis, before I learnt these in this quarter, my brain was just messed up with all the knowledge points. However, after I complete this course, I feel very clear for many contents I didn’t understand before. Such as descriptive and inferential statistics, I was afraid of statistics before, even in this early quarter, statistics are quite difficult to me. Especially for the inferential statistics, I didn’t understand anything, such as Chi-square test and T-test, but I didn’t give up and asked professor and classmates to help me. Finally, I overcame it! Right now I even feel analyzing data is the most interesting part in the research. A good instructional designer also need possess rich statistics knowledge. Thus, I will continue learning research methods and data analysis, practicing more statistics techniques for my future work.
Reference
Mertler, Craig A. (2014). Action research : improving schools and empowering educators (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.