Data Synthesis – Blog Post #8 D.S.
David S -
Hello everyone, this week I have been working on synthesizing data from my Google Forms questionnaire. There have been trends that I did not expect to have in this experiment since I started. Today, I will begin giving some insight into my results for my experiment and what results I was able to gather from the different teachers’ responses.
Looking at the general overview of the results from the multiple-choice question asking teachers what distractors they have in their classroom, we have three top contenders. The first option that came to the highest, with almost every teacher picking it except one, was people/friends talking. This was to be expected in the classroom since not all the students may have access to technology, and their classmates and friends are their next best option. Having a person right next to you to talk to is much more convenient in terms of being a distraction, since students usually sit next to their friends and have side conversations with them. Therefore, this distractor is the most prominent, as highlighted by the teachers. The second highest distractor picked by teachers was working on materials from other classes, with 15 of the 19 teachers picking this option. Since there is a lot of classwork and homework in classes, it is often the case that the students do not get to finish all their work in one class period and forget about it at home, so it remains as something they do in other classes right before it is due—of course, I am also guilty of doing this. With 13 teachers voting for tardiness, it is the third highest option after talking and working on materials from other classes. While this may be hard to correlate with technology and other distractions from the list, it is something that can be further researched in my experiment to see how that may tie in with this distractor.
In my next blog post, I will be discussing the free response questions of my questionnaire and the answers I received to see how these distractors may tie in with issues in the classroom. Then, we will see if there is any sort of connection between tablets and technology distracting children in the classrooms, or if it is just pure coincidence and these distractors have nothing in common.
Thank you for following along and see you in the next blog post!