Research Question: How does guided discovery instruction impact students’ achievement in, and attitudes toward, math?
Participants: I will measure quantitative data from all or most of the students I teach. I will conduct interviews with selected students or volunteers.
Measures:
I will have a pretest and posttest of the material I will present through guided discovery. The students will take the pretest before the lesson, and the posttest may be included in the unit exam or quiz, or I may give out a specialized posttest separately.
I will conduct interviews and/or focus groups with selected students who provide a consent form. I will ask guided questions on their attitudes and feelings towards the lessons conducted by guided discovery.
I will keep diligent reflections of how the guided discovery lessons go, as well as any issues or anything that goes especially well. I may also ask my cooperating teacher to take observation notes.
Analysis:
Interviews will be tape-recorded and then coded for expressions showing their attitudes toward the different lesson-style.
The scores of the pretest and posttest will be compared, possibly with a t-test.
I like your research question a lot. Will you be interviewing students before discovery learning as well? It might be interesting to see the general attitudes towards their mathematics instruction before you start. I am looking forward to seeing whether students use similar expressions to describe their experience. I also think it will be very interesting to see if improved attitudes correlate with improved scores as well. I think you are off to a great start.
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