In one of the steps, you will have to create your survey. Please develop 5 questions/statements for your survey with appropriate response/answer choices. You do not have to collect data, analyze your data, or develop a write-up or summary based on your findings. STEPS 1 and 2 are already done and will be attached
Step 3: Establish research objectives
Research objective: Conduct analyses comparing student outcome data collected prior to implementing our current curriculum to the outcome data collected after we implemented our current curriculum. We would expect to see no change or minor change in the first year because of the newness of the curriculum and the training requirements for teachers, so we want to make sure we are looking at that data over time and not just the first year it was implemented.
Once we have the results of that comparison study, we can create and conduct teacher and coach surveys in all the schools using this curriculum in our district (~1000 total participants) asking them about the different aspects of the curriculum, their confidence in the effectiveness of those aspects and their confidence in their ability to utilize those aspects to their full potential. Teachers/coaches will respond to items using a likert scale from no confidence to completely confident or completely disagree to completely agree depending on the item. Teachers/coaches will have 3 weeks to complete the survey online.
After we have some results from the survey, we can conduct interviews with a subset of teachers and coaches (~5 per school, selected at random from those teachers/coaches who completed the survey) to gain more information about the curriculum, its effectiveness, and any curricular supports teachers/coaches may need based on their responses to the survey.
Step 4: Determine research design
The research design for this study is predominantly exploratory. We do not know whether the curriculum is associated with improved student outcomes, decreased student outcomes, or stagnant student outcomes, so we are exploring those possibilities. This piece of the research design is also causal though, because we are looking for a causal relationship between the curriculum and student outcomes. The survey and interview aspects of the research design are exploratory though. We do not know what aspects of the curriculum are working/not working or how teachers/coaches feel about them, so we are using and exploratory design to examine these things.
Step 5: Identify information types and sources
The student outcome data we will be using in the initial steps of our research design is secondary information because it has already been collected by the district over the last 5 years. The information we collect from our survey and interviews will be primary information though, because we are collecting that information ourselves and we are doing so to address the specific problem we have outlined.
Step 6: Determining methods of accessing data
To access this data, we will ask the district to provide us the student outcome data for the past 5 years (for those classes using the curriculum we are targeting). For the survey data, we will be using computer-assisted questioning through a platform such as Qualtrics. For the interview data, we will have a person asking interview questions and collecting responses via a face to face or virtual interview.
Step 7: Design data collection
When creating our survey it is important that we ensure that we are using clear, objective, and unbiased wording in order to ensure we are getting the information we intended to get from our participants. The questions on this survey will ask about various aspects of the curriculum and the teacher/coaches opinion and confidence in these aspects so we can determine the usefulness of the curriculum and its components to answer our research questions.
Step 8: Determine sample plan, and size
We are going to look at the data for all students in the district who participated in classes using the target curriculum. For the survey, we will be sending the survey to all teachers and coaches who work directly with the target curriculum, but it is highly unlikely we will have a significantly high response rate. We will work toward a 60% response rate from our teachers by sending out reminders and proving incentives if possible (eg., PD credit). For our interviews, we are going to conduct interviews with 5 teachers/coaches selected at random from those who completed the survey from each school in the district that uses the target curriculum. We will ensure we get all 5 interviews from each school by contacting an additional teacher/coach for every teacher/coach selected who fails to participate in their interview.