Prior to the administration of any instruments, parents will give their consent and students will give their assent to participate in the research study. All participants will be informed that their questionnaire answers and assessment results will be kept confidential. In addition, all students and their parents will be informed that they may withdraw from the study at any time, without providing a reason. Participants will be learning a unit of instruction that is aligned with the curriculum and is comprised of grade-level appropriate skills. Because the research study involves expected learning objectives, no form of compensation is being provided for participation.
The researcher wants to identify what technologies participants …show more content…
The teacher will make special note of any differences observed between the engagement of participants learning with the technology enhanced unit versus the traditional unit. It is strongly recommended that the teacher keep a log or journal of observations to ensure they are included as evidence in the analysis phase of the study. Ongoing formal observations of both the control and treatment groups are required, to determine if any additional explanation or re-teaching is required before advancing to the next lesson in the unit. Because student engagement in an activity is nearly impossible to measure quantitatively, teacher observation is the primary instrument used to measure this aspect of the research study. The teacher will then use enumeration to quantitize the qualitative evidence by assigning numerical values. A value of zero will represent a completely unengaged participant, while a value of ten will indicate a participant who is fully engaged. The values will be based on the teacher’s observed engagement of each participant in the instructional unit. By converting the qualitative evidence to qualitative data, the researcher will have many more options available for data …show more content…
The same accommodations will be provided to special education students as they received on the pre-assessment. Participant performance on the post-assessment will be judged against a rubric, as with the pre-assessment. The scores on each question will be recorded, and this information will serve as the culminating data against which the pre-assessment scores will be compared to measure student improvement. All participant post-assessment scores will be recorded on a chart, in order to be compared to the pre-assessment scores in the data analysis