Aracelie_Reading Log_16 Feb 10

Posted by on February 14, 2010 
Filed under Reading logs

“How Do I Design My SoTL Project?”  It seems like a straightforward question to ask.  But then one begins to read McKinney’s chapter six and realizes designing a project is almost as complex as determining a single of SoTL.  Thankfully, she addresses general decisions regarding quantitative/qualitative and timeframes before describing the “numerous possible specific methodologies for reflecting on and studying teaching and learning”.

Anyone that has ever taken a course that involves experiments probably has at least some vague recollection of the data that is “quantitative” and “qualitative”.  Quantitative data is typically equated with “numerical” while qualitative data is generally defined as “verbal”.  McKinney presents more detailed descriptions and with application to SoTL.  Qualitative data, she states, “more directly reflect the voice of the participant”.  Keeping in mind my own question of veterans transitioning to higher education institutions, I find myself leaning more toward qualitative data rather than quantitative for this reason.  Although I firmly believe numbers are our friends, I do not think trends and and statistics alone would reveal as much as the actual thoughts and words of the veterans.  A combination of the two types of data, however, might be worth pursuing.

In McKinney’s discussion of timeframes, she calls attention to “cross-sectional” and “longitudinal” designs.  I am having a harder time understanding the use for the former which takes information as a “snapshot” or single point in time.  Maybe that is because of my analytical job.  When I take a “snapshot”, it is typically to compare it to something else done in the past or to be completed in the future.  I suppose that my confusion makes sense, though, because McKinney does say cross-sectional designs are not ideal for viewing changes over given periods of time.

The deeper we go into McKinney’s book, the more I appreciate it.  It serves as not only a welcome to the world of SoTL, but also gives guidance on how to tackle SoTL projects and questions.  On the first day of class, when we did our cubing exercise, I was thinking, “Uh-oh.  What is he really talking about?  Am I going to be able to apply any of this?  More importantly, what would I apply it to?”  The nine Getting Started questions posed in chapter three serve as a great template to build upon.   Having answered them last week allowed me to relate the specific methodologies McKinney discusses in this chapter to my own research question.  As such, the focus groups and questionnaires, observational research, and content analysis seem to be the first avenues I would explore for my SoTL project.

Comments



One Response to “Aracelie_Reading Log_16 Feb 10”

  • Darren Cambridge on February 16th, 2010 7:01 pm    

    You’re right that the cubing exercise wasn’t designed to give you something you could apply immediately. Rather, it was designed to make visible some of the pre-existing understandings of teaching and scholarship you all bring to the class, which, we learned from How People Learn and Marchese, need to be taken into account to support deep learning. My hope is that, as the course progresses, you’ll be able to look back at those early ideas and see both how they’re coloring your reactions to new material and how your understanding of these core ideas are changing.

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