Sense Making

Looking through a bunch of interviews and trying to make sense of and sieve out the recurring themes. Not easy, kept going back and fro the interviews whenever a new theme emerges. 

Intense

There is only one word to describe the data collection currently on-going in my project. 
INTENSE.

Observation & Hands-On

Today is the start of our project's intensive data collection period. We have to collect data from 49 schools within 10-12 weeks. :S With permission from the school, I led my 7 part-time and full-time RAs to the school to conduct data collection. I felt like a mother hen with all her chicks lol. :P I always believe that seeing and doing helps one to learn better than just listening. Indeed the part-timers felt the observation and hands-on were useful for them. :)

Pilot Study II

It is day 2 of our pilot study. I am glad that I could still silence the misbehaving students with a stare. :P

Pilot Study

Today is the first of our data collection for our pilot study. All went well. It is nice to be back in the classroom and be in front of students. I haven't lost my touch as a teacher. :P 

Project Progress

It is the last week of data collection for my project. :) The next stage of the project is to start our data entry and cleaning. It's going to take two or three weeks just to do that.

Term 2 2011

Data collection starts again. After a week of break, it is back to scheduling of backup RAs and being on standby.

Clean Up

I have two data sets - one on student interview coding (completed by the RAs) and one on artifact coding (completed by me). I have to do some cleaning up of the data so that it is easier to run data analysis later with SPSS. Cleaning up is tedious work, much worse than data entry lol.

Work in Progress

Work in progress:
1. The examples given by the coders for each dimension are being incorporated into the coding manual. :)
2. The codings of the artifacts have been entered and they are ready for analysis. :)
3. All the student interviews have been coded with the data entered and they are ready for analysis. :)
4. The teacher interviews are still in the midst of coding and some of the codes have been tightened up after discussion.

Data Entry

The coding exercise was completed last week. We managed to receive about 82% agreement between the 3 coders for the consensus coding. That is pretty good result. :) Now I am left with the data entry for the individual coding. I should be able to finish the remaining 15 schools' artifacts by middle of this week.

Coding Exercise II

It's the second day. Things are going very smoothly. The teachers were coding faster as they have found a common understanding of the coding dimensions. While the teachers were coding, I started to do the data entry. Might as well start now as there will be well over 1500 artifact codes to be keyed in once the coding exercise is completed...

Data Entry

Updated 6 November 3:23am.
I have completed the data entry for 112 students. My left shoulder is aching very BADLY. :( Still another 112 students to go.

There was testing in school today. After the testing, I had to enter the scores into an excel file before we can run the analysis. I have 224 students' responses to key in. That's a total of 12096 responses. :( My shoulders are going to be sore.