Blog post #1 – Technology in Middle School Science Classes D.S.

David S -

My name is David Stefan, and I am researching the impacts of tablet technology and computers on student attention in middle school science classes.

For my research, I have created a questionnaire with questions for teachers regarding different distractions in their classroom that they may or may not notice taking away from the attention span of their students. First with an option to pick from a list of 10 distractions, then a section for them to choose the prominence of each distractor, and finally a free response question asking them to elaborate on their top distractor. 

I have encountered some issues with my project at first. The most prominent issue being that I do not have enough responses from the teachers I sent my questionnaire to. However, after consulting with my teacher and head of school, who has been helping direct me and the direction of my research, I decided to send my questionnaire to a chain of middle schools throughout Arizona that would make it easier for me to receive responses from. Right now, I have about twenty responses from the different schools across the valley. I am hoping to receive at least ten more and hopefully more than that by the end of my data collection period. I hope to be able to have all the responses I need by around the end of January, as it should not take that long for teachers to receive, complete, and submit the questionnaire through the Google form.

With the results from my questionnaire, I hope to be able to conclude to highlight what issues the tablet technology and computers are having over student attention span, if it is negative or positive. However, I am aware that I could receive answers that are completely different than what I am investigating through the lens of my study. The teachers could choose from many other distraction choices that have nothing to do with technology or the tablets themselves. Therefore, I am going to meet with the head of school and discuss different ways in which I can synthesize my data that would be useful for my study, even though it may not be fully focused on the tablets themselves, yet other issues that affect student attention in the middle school science classes. Another issue that I have run into is that not all and many classes that I have sent out the survey to rarely utilize the tablet technology in their classrooms, so that is immediately going to give me skewed results since nothing is being tested for in the classroom. After a discussion with my teacher, I have decided to include computers in the survey as an option for tablet technology/computers, as computers are much more likely to be used within classrooms since students can bring these into the classes to help them learn. So far, I am still gathering data from my questionnaire and devising a plan to synthesize my data if results do not point towards technology, or very few do.

More Posts

Comments:

All viewpoints are welcome but profane, threatening, disrespectful, or harassing comments will not be tolerated and are subject to moderation up to, and including, full deletion.

    sai_g
    With the data you've gathered so far, have you noticed any possible patterns in how teachers compare technology-related distractions to non-tech ones? Also, since some of the classes you're looking at don’t use tablets, do you think this suggests a preference for computers or other tools (interactive whiteboards, textbooks, hands-on projects, etc.) over tablets specifically?
    February 27, 2025 at 9:18 pm - Reply
    david_s
    That's a great question. When creating my questionnaire, I did not specifically point the teachers towards technology at all. Technology was one of the 10 distractors that I had on the list for them to pick from. As a result, I did not see any specific patterns in comparison of technology and non-technology-based distractors. I also did not ask the teachers to compare between the distractors, so I did not have too much room for comparing distractors. In the free response questions, I just made the teachers describe why they think their top pick for distractor is so prominent in their classroom. For your second question, I actually did change the distractor and focus of the study to tablets/technology, so it gives me more room for different forms of technology in the classroom that can fall under technology that students get distracted by. Any preference for technology would work for my experiment.
    February 28, 2025 at 12:33 pm - Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *