I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and got to kick off their holidays in right fashion of over indulging in food, spending quality family time, and watching lots of good football! This all would have been possible for me if I was not a graduate student trying to keep up with everything but alas it will all be worth it when I have that diploma hanging on the wall! So can you believe it we have reached the FINAL assignment?!? I would like to pat myself and all my peers on the back for completeing this semester. It sure hasn't been easy but it has been very educaitonal, stimulating, and overall I feel like I am going to be a better teacher than most because of the knowledge I am walking away with from this class! So onto the final assignment....
Basically, Dr. Pierce gave a re-do on our action research project. For those of us who did not do well (ahem) have a chance to redeem ourselves with another paper. Our first requirement was to go to the National Center for Educational Statistics, (NCES) website and learn a little about what we were going to be researching. The NCES is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education. One of it is assessments are the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, and it is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas. Assessments are conducted periodically in mathematics, reading, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history. For our research project Dr. Pierce wanted us to do a state comparison, (whatever state you are living in), of 8th grade mathematics score by gender. You can do state comparisons of your choice by going here NAEP state comparison. But for all intent purposes the final product of our comparison looked like this:
After this was completed you have the option of downloading your results into a Excel spreadsheet. And in true Ed Tech fashion this is what we did. After that was completed you needed to conduct some t-tests to prove whether gender affected mathematics scores. My results proved that gender did NOT affect mathematics scores so that can be laid to rest and the results can be read in my paper which will be linked at the end of my blog.
I must say that this assignment came a lot easier to me than the previous action research project. I don't know if it was how the results were labeled in the spreadsheet, or if it was all of the examples Dr. Pierce provided us on how to conduct the tests and how our results should be reported. All I know is that I feel as if I conducted this assignment with a slight bit more confidence and feeling like ok I finally got this stats stuff down. I feel a bit relieved because I do know that being able to interpret, conduct, and report research is going to be a big role in my professional teaching career so I feel grateful that I have had two opportunities to learn this and I am sure that this will not be the last time it is part of my graduate studies.
The NETS T that the FINAL assignment fulfilled was:
And here is the link to my NAEP assignment: The final assignment.
That's it blog world I hope you enjoyed the reading and hearing my about my progress in this class and walk away with a little bit more knowledge than before. I know I certainly have!
Ciao,
Andria
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