Data Collection Recap

As mentioned in earlier posts data collection was something that I struggled with. I began the process with a survey that I administered to the students. The survey was a teacher created survey in hopes to gather insight into how students felt about themselves as readers. The survey is posted in several places on my blog and the initial findings were described through a thick description of the results. I gave the survey initially to all students in both classes. This was around 46 students. There were some students who I did not receive their consent forms so some of the surveys were not used in the data collection. I was hoping that with my findings I would see that one class had a positive self image of themselves as a reader and one class would have a negative self image as a reader. When looking through the results, I realized that I had too much information to reach a valid conclusion. That's when I decided to reduce the sample size. I chose my sample size based on their answers and my personal experiences with them as a student in their 4th grade year. The results from the survey showed that the students in both classes, overall, had a positive self image as a reader. This was a shocking finding to me because I was sure students in the class of struggling readers would have a negative view of themselves as readers. I spent a whole year with these kids and saw the lack of confidence in these students which stemmed from their ability as a reader. I knew the students in the advanced class had a positive self image and some proved to have almost an arrogance about themselves. I would like to look further into this idea in the future and see if there could be other options for other types of data collection. I feel like maybe the fact that I was the teacher in charge of administering this tool that the students wanted to give me the answers they thought I wanted to hear. The sample size may have had an influence on the results as well.