I have been working really hard on trying to figure out how to fit all of my information together and narrow down my topic. I never realized how difficult it is to be "picky" with which journal entries will be good enough and which ones will not be good enough with writing. Also a really difficult thing has kind of been figuring out how to use the journal searches to find exactly what I’ve been looking for. I found a great paper that has helped a lot in my introduction it is by Nicole B. Ellison and Yuehua Wu. The paper is entitled, Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehension. This paper has really helped me in a way figure out which direction I want to go with my project and has given me more hope--There are articles out there for me!! :-)
This study specifically breaks up different parts of blogging to find out which parts students find the most useful. This gives me a better grasp on what I have to do for my project. I struggled at first with figuring out what it is I really want to study and how to go about doing so. This study is very specific when considering which parts of blogging helps students more. While it just takes students opinions on the matters, it still is a good model for my own project. Specifically the study gives students the options of which helps educate the students most: writing the blog, reading others’ blogs, or reading comments placed on their own blogs. Being specific like Ellison and Wu is something that I need to do when looking at the variables of my study. The other aspect of this study which is covered is looking in general at feedback given by peers.
With this study I took a specifically close look at their methods section. This type of method would be difficult if not impossible for me to do. The study was set up within a class in which the students had registered for. For my particular study I will be taking volunteers from different introductory classes; however, the way in which the Ellison/Wu study gave different types of assignments and compared them intrigued me.
Ellison and Wu used a survey to gather some information from their students, which I think would be very helpful in my study as well. They collected standard demographic information, student perceptions of the assignments on helpfulness and the general topic, and finally they obtained comprehension and behavior results. All of these topics seem to be important and would be a possible addition to the methods of my study.
This experiment focusing on the students perceptions of how these different aspects of blogging help them within a classroom is very useful when considering my project. I am looking to find some more articles similar to this so that I can find a better base for reasons why my study needs to be done. Right now I seem to have very broad sources of background information which makes it difficult to narrow down my study. Finding sources such as this one and others like it will help my project, especially since I have decided I would like to look specifically at blogging and its relationship to students’ comprehension of information, specifically as was done in Ellison and Wu’s paper.
Citation:
Ellison, N. B., & Wu, Y. (2008). Blogging in the classroom: A preliminary exploration of student attitudes and impact on comprehension. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 17(1), 99-122.
Comments (1)
Don't be frustrated! When we are first developing an idea for research (especially when we don't have prior knowledge of the field), it takes a while to develop an understanding of the terrain. Actually, that's quite reasonable if you think about it...how would it be possible for you to understand the scope of a field in such a short amount of time? Eventually, as you continue to do what you are doing, you will get a better sense of what has been done and where your study can fit in that previous literature. Remember, people can spend their entire careers contributing to a particular field, this is just your first foray into the process of research. So far, looks like you are doing a great job finding appropriate literature and thinking about it carefully.
Posted by Prof Knupsky | April 7, 2009 9:16 AM
Posted on April 7, 2009 09:16