I met with Dr. BC and walked away feeling EXTREMELY overwhelmed with what to do. I decided to take only a small bit of my students writing and code it for activity 4. I plan to really dive in this weekend and do a lot more coding. I will update more about my research this weekend as it comes along.
As Dr. BC and I talked we began really talking about the "research design" and the participants in my study. I am really looking for a word to replace "struggling" in my RQ. I don't want to talk about these kids using the word struggling. What do you all think about emergent?
One thing I didn't see coming through my meeting with Dr. BC was the decision to throw the student "Parker" out. He was the one student who truly fit the "reluctant" characteristic but we discussed that he is not struggling/emergent/pre-writer/etc so we decided to throw him. He seemed like the perfect for into my project and I ended up learning great ways to push him to being a better writer but he just didn't fit my profile.
Crazy how this is such an ongoing process! What a different world this is than anything else we have ever done!
I hate that you still felt overwhelmed even after meeting with Dr. BC. It is important to remember that we are first time researchers; hence the bumps in the road. I hope the coding process went well for you this weekend. I like the word “emergent” and find it to be a wonderful replacement for the word “struggling”. As first graders who are just now learning how to write, I would definitely consider them emergent writers more than I would struggling. I am surprised to hear you will not be using Parker in your research as you talked a lot about him but at least you found things that worked for him.
ReplyDeleteRachel, I think the entire research process is crazy. I, too, feel very overwhelmed and almost unsure of what I'm doing. The word emergent sounds good. I think Parker would have been a fun student to read about and I was looking forward to hearing how he turned out, but I can see that he doesn't fit the bill for your project. I hope everything comes together for you soon.
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