Reflections on session 5

Oh my what a stressful session it was. The only time I got to breathe was during the lunch break. And yes we shared a bit of laughter when we got into groups to work on the SPSS software !

a) Web 2.0 environment framework

Dr Quek took us for a ride with the web 2.0 environment framework and I was pretty overwhelmed with the number of softwares available for content sharing and social networking. Commonly used ones are the Blogspot, Ning, Myspace, Flickr, YouTube, Wetpaint, Zoho and Goowy.

My Reflection

Dr Quek said something that really triggered my brain cells that is as practitioners we should always think of better ways to improve our teaching and engage students interest with such learning environments. Being able to use the Blogspot and Wiki comfortably after these sessions, i would introduce these learning environments to my students or maybe embark on an action research with my department.

b) Case study on the use of the CPS and improving learning environment

We also looked at a beginning researcher who used the CPS in his classroom and used a modified version of the WIHIC to assess his student's learning. He only used 4 scales in the WIHIC. They were the Teacher Support, Involvement, Student Cohesiveness and Equity. One additional scale the material support which is not a scale found in the WIHIC was used in the modified version of his instrument. Modified instruments scales can come from different instruments and after assessments done and results obtained as researchers we have to work on the followup actions. We can conduct interviews or focus group discussions with our students to get feedback on the learning environement with problems and design interventions and improve.

My Reflection

I have used the CPS in my school during a staff contact time to get intsantaneous feedback for survey questions. But personally have not tried it in my classes. CPS can be another means of getting the assessment done immediately than putting the instruments like the WIHIC online or administering the instrument before and after certain types of learning environment. Modifying the instruments to suit the needs of the research question is crucial and items do not have to neccessarily come from one particular instrument but from other validated instruments. After the assessment is done what is the next step? Are there gonna be any follow up actions or interventions? In the improvement process, after the problems in the learning environment is identified, intervention is neccessary. Planning and tracking of the intervention would take 1 to 2 months and the instrument have to to administered again to see if the problem had be solved.

c) Use of the SPSS software

We had the oppportunity to use the preferred and actual forms of the WIHIC and then keyed in the results into an excel sheet, transferred them to the SPSS and data tabulated. We obtained the item, scale means, standard deviation and the reliability coefficient calculated. We also compared the means using the paired sample T test. Using all these data, we can find out which items are significant and had to be intervined and improved.

My Reflection

SPSS is an wonderful creation to obtain all the relevent data needed for analysis. Its gives us the ease of calculating the means, standard deviation and cronbach's alpha then manually using formulae to calculate these values which would take ages for a very large sample.

Thank you