My Research Project Design

As being the first from my immediate family to get a Bachelor's Degree and the first from my entire family to be striving for my Master's Degree, I had no idea what a Plan B Project Design entailed. These initial readings and meeting with my adviser, Tara, has made things a lot clearer to me and I am excited to get started, but still have a lot to think about.

First, some background of my Plan B Project so far is that using my STEMSS Unit, I will be measuring the engagement of both my Upperclassmen and Underclassmen (specifically Freshman) students. My Upperclassmen are my Physics students and my Freshman are my Integrated Science students. The type of engagement is the part that I am struggling with the most but am deciding between measuring the students' engagement through the amount of participation in the class, the quality of work that the students are doing, and/or even the interest in a possible STEM Career. One of the outcomes that I would receive from my research question is to determine if I should be teaching a STEMSS Unit early or later on in my students' high school days and the other outcome is to allow the students to see STEM in a more desirable light by relating it to culture and the world around them.

The type of research that I am doing, according to Creswell, would be Qualitative Research because my data will be coming from my students as they are participating within my classroom. I will be having my students reflect on certain aspects of the unit as well as how they feel are benefiting from the concepts learned. So far I have had my students do a reflection on one of their learning journeys and from what I collected, I found that the learning journey was very beneficial but I still was not able to determine if learning journeys could be more beneficial towards the upperclassmen or underclassmen.

The type of Philosophical Worldview, I feel that I may be leaning to more of a Social Constructivist Worldview because I am relying a lot of my data on my participants and how they feel about my unit and how it is affecting their levels of engagement. I do feel that I need to continue researching on this type of Worldview so that it will help to drive my research better.

For my Qualitative Strategies of Inquiry, I plan to use Ethnography and Case Studies. Ethnography allows me to observe the students in my classrooom setting, which is both inside of my physical classroom and outside on our learning journeys. Case studies will be more specific towards my research than ethnography though because I create the activities that the students experience and I collect data based off of their experiences.