Blog Post #3 – Procedure D.S.
David S -
What has challenged your thinking?
What has challenged my thinking is receiving results that may be incorrect from the teachers. When I began this questionnaire and sent it out to the teachers, I had first designed the Likert scale a bit backwards with 10 being the least important distractor in the classroom and 1 being the most important distractor in the classroom that takes away from the students’ attention span. This was a bit confusing for some teachers, as it created some misunderstandings about the results. Some teachers did not follow the text in the question that told them how to answer the question and flipped the results.
However, I was able to mitigate this issue after talking with the head of the school. The method that we came up with on how to fix this issue is to go into the questionnaire on Google Docs and go through each one of the responses submitted by the middle school science teachers individually to find out which one had potentially flipped on the Likert scale section when responding to the questionnaire. Specifically, I started by going through the distractors that they picked and then went to see how each one of the factors was ranked. Then, after seeing a very high score, I went to the free response section, where they were asked to explain why they had chosen their top distractor in the classroom. If their top-ranked distractor lined up with the same distractor mentioned in their free-response section, I knew they had done the survey correctly and did not have to fix anything from there. If they had done it the other way around, with one star on the Likert scale, and mentioned that in their free-response section, I knew they had done it incorrectly. After analyzing the first few results, I realized more teachers had answered incorrectly than correctly, so I knew I had to make changes.
Modifying the questionnaire to be more easily understandable by the teachers was quite simple. 10 stars mean a distractor that is most prevalent in the classroom, while one star means a distractor that has little to no impact on the students’ attention spans in the classroom. For example, if a teacher chose ten stars on tablets, then they talked about this issue in their free-response section of the questionnaire on why they think this distractor is as prominent of an issue as it is in their classroom.
Lastly, I had to normalize the incorrect responses that I was left with when switching the Likert scale values. This was quite simple as there were only a few incorrect responses. What I did was only switch the values of their Likert scale. For example, if they put 1 star, I switched it to 10, as it is the opposite. If it was 3 previously, I switched it to 7 stars. Other than that, the responses remained the same and untouched.
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