Limitations
As a science teacher one of the skills I teach my students is identifying potential sources of error in their experiments. As an educational researcher it is only fitting that I discuss the limitations of my ow research. The limitations to my research included time, personal bias, and difficulty pinpointing motivation. In each of these areas I took steps to reduce the impact these limitations had on the results of my research.
Time
One of the biggest struggles while conducting this research was the time constraints. The way I designed the two phases was to incorporate an end of unit project for two units. This presented somewhat of a challenge in timing. For each unit I only had about 8-10 instructional days to cover all of the necessary content and complete the project. I felt that it was important to spend time working on the projects in class to provide support to my students as well as observe and collect data on motivation and engagement. As a result of the time constraints the projects felt a bit rushed with only 1-1.5 weeks provided and only a few days of instructional time. To compensate for this I cut down on the scope of the projects and had them focus on only a few key concepts.
Personal Bias
When conducting action research it is impossible to be an objective third party. These were my students that I had been with for the entire school year and I wanted to see them succeed in these projects. Because of this my observations tended to focus on the positive change in the classroom and glaze over those aspects that were neutral or not supportive of my research goals. To compensate for this bias I included as much student voice and quantitative data as possible. It is my hope that I reduced the amount of bias in my findings by balancing my positive observations with hard data and first hand student responses.
Pinpointing Motivation
Classrooms are not laboratories. Experiments in classrooms do not occur in a vacuum and variables totally unrelated to my research still had an effect. The bare bones goal of my research was to study the effect of choice in assessments on student motivation. In an ideal world I would be able to isolate my variables and control all outside factors so that I could see how choice purely affected motivation. In reality there were many factors that came into play with my students’ motivation, from assignments in other classes to the end of year pressure. It was impossible to single out and accurately measure the role that choice itself played in the increased motivation levels I observed. Just as I did to reduce reducing bias, I got as much student input as I could and used my students’ responses to infer a relationship between choice, interest, and motivation. Did choice increase motivation? I would definitely say yes. To what extent, however, it is difficult to say.
Despite the unavoidable limitations of researching in the classroom, I feel that I took effective measures to overcome these limitations. As a result I believe that the findings presented in this research contain valid learning with relevance not only to my own teaching but beyond, with implications for general teaching practices and policy.
Time
One of the biggest struggles while conducting this research was the time constraints. The way I designed the two phases was to incorporate an end of unit project for two units. This presented somewhat of a challenge in timing. For each unit I only had about 8-10 instructional days to cover all of the necessary content and complete the project. I felt that it was important to spend time working on the projects in class to provide support to my students as well as observe and collect data on motivation and engagement. As a result of the time constraints the projects felt a bit rushed with only 1-1.5 weeks provided and only a few days of instructional time. To compensate for this I cut down on the scope of the projects and had them focus on only a few key concepts.
Personal Bias
When conducting action research it is impossible to be an objective third party. These were my students that I had been with for the entire school year and I wanted to see them succeed in these projects. Because of this my observations tended to focus on the positive change in the classroom and glaze over those aspects that were neutral or not supportive of my research goals. To compensate for this bias I included as much student voice and quantitative data as possible. It is my hope that I reduced the amount of bias in my findings by balancing my positive observations with hard data and first hand student responses.
Pinpointing Motivation
Classrooms are not laboratories. Experiments in classrooms do not occur in a vacuum and variables totally unrelated to my research still had an effect. The bare bones goal of my research was to study the effect of choice in assessments on student motivation. In an ideal world I would be able to isolate my variables and control all outside factors so that I could see how choice purely affected motivation. In reality there were many factors that came into play with my students’ motivation, from assignments in other classes to the end of year pressure. It was impossible to single out and accurately measure the role that choice itself played in the increased motivation levels I observed. Just as I did to reduce reducing bias, I got as much student input as I could and used my students’ responses to infer a relationship between choice, interest, and motivation. Did choice increase motivation? I would definitely say yes. To what extent, however, it is difficult to say.
Despite the unavoidable limitations of researching in the classroom, I feel that I took effective measures to overcome these limitations. As a result I believe that the findings presented in this research contain valid learning with relevance not only to my own teaching but beyond, with implications for general teaching practices and policy.