I have found that many of the bugs are starting to come out of this project. On Tuesday, my speech and debate teacher, Mrs. Tucker, was sick. She told me that on that day I could teach the class a lesson and use the class as a part of my project. Initially, this was a very exciting prospect for me. I made a lesson plan, and I wrote a short quiz for the students after the lesson.
I decided to teach the class using the interactive method, since I had little time to plan out a lecture style class, wherein the entire class has a discussion on the topic. I gave them a quiz, and the results were very impressive, everyone did well. However, after I taught the class and quizzed them, I realized that I was unable to compare the quiz results to anything. So I was unsure of what to do, because I did not think to establish a baseline for their knowledge before I taught them. So I had to figure out what to do.
The next day, Wednesday, Mrs. Tucker was still sick. So I was able to make a second attempt to collect data on a method. After I consulted a few teachers and my adviser, I decided that in order to establish a baseline knowledge before the lesson I needed to give the students a pre-quiz. I wrote out a quiz, gave it to them before the lesson, and then I gave them the quiz again after the lesson. I thought that I had fixed the issue, however, turns out I did not.
Mr. Calhoun, the English teacher at school was supervising my lesson yesterday.(I am not able to teach without a faculty member for liability reasons) He explained to me many of the issues with my lesson, and long story short, I did not teach correctly. The quizzes were short answer, which makes empirical grading more difficult(at least for me) and the goal of the discussion was not made clear(my fault) so both of those days yielded no data, yet they did help me. If you're wondering how, I found 99 ways not to research teaching methods.
In the end, I realized that with the time and resources I have for this project, I will need to scale back the experiments scope. I will throw out the interactive method, and now I will be examining teacher-centered learning and student-centered learning. Interactive method, when done correctly, is in itself difficult to examine, and many of my test subjects who are history students do not really have opportunity to use that format. I am optimistic about the future of this project. Now, I can write more multiple choice quizzes based on the two methods left, and I can get a clearer image from the students.
Even though I have not gained data yet, this week has not been for naught. I have been watching and learning from my adviser, Mr. Bayer, all week. And starting tomorrow, I will distribute a baseline quiz to the AP World and European History students. Also happening tomorrow, I will teach the AP World class a lesson and I will hand out the post-lesson quizzes. Tomorrow I plan on getting the first official data. Till then!
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