MAED6163 - 5th Article

Our school is going to organize a STEM day in March. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of STEM day, I am going to collect the data before and after the STEM day. In this pilot study, I will mainly focus on the research I did before STEM day.

My colleagues and I organized a lunchtime programme on November 7, 2016. In the programme, we clearly explained the criteria and the purpose of the task to students so that students can have better understanding about the arrangement of STEM day.

On November 14, 2016, I requested students in my class to stay after school to discuss the details of their products (Other classes will be done in February). After all students were on progress, I selected one group and interviewed with them with the help of audio recording due to limited manpower.

After the interview, I used grounded-theory to analyze data. I would like to evaluate the effectiveness of STEM day and therefore I do not have any hypothesis at the beginning. When I started the interview with audio recording, the analysis takes place and will be stopped when I collected and data after the STEM day at the end of the research study.

But since other classes has not yet started the interview, only one interview and one group of data is difficult to do coding (which consists of indexing of the interview) and further exploration on other important or interesting topics. Therefore, I have only collected, organized and presented the data but will wait for other classes for further analysis. A list of relevant and similar content will be excerpted later.

When I was collecting the data, I am glad to see that my students showed improvement. At the beginning, they were nervous and refused to talk and have video recording. But after they warmed up, they spoke fluently and confidently. And the progress is smooth.

When I was organizing and presenting the data (Transcripts and graph), I was super tired because firstly, my typing speed is very slow that I had to repeat the audio again and again in order to catch up every words they said. Secondly, I needed to spend time on gathering all data in the worksheets before calculation. Thirdly, present the data through plotting the graph also took me quite long time because I was not familiar using excel plotting diagram. Tired but fruitful.

(401 words)