Methodology

Research Question: Does analyzing and addressing student misconceptions improve student achievement?

Participants: All of the students in one of my student teaching preps.

Measures:

Artifacts – short 1-2 question daily (or every other day) quizzes that test procedural and conceptual understanding of the previous day’s (or couple of days’) material; unit tests that test procedural and conceptual understanding of the completed unit; lesson plans where misconceptions found in quizzes are specifically addressed

Interview – interviews with students where I have them do mathematical tasks relating to recently covered material orally, explaining their thought processes

Observation –log/note-taking of the methods and thought processes I use when analyzing the quizzes for misconceptions, log/note-taking of the methods and thought processes I use when analyzing the oral interviews for misconceptions

Analysis: My study will include both qualitative and quantitative research. I will compare the scores of the quizzes to the scores of the unit tests to determine if there was improvement in student achievement after I re-taught based on misconceptions that I identified and analyzed from the student quizzes and interviews. I will categorize common misconceptions based on my observations in my log of my analytic process. Then I will attempt to see if there was a change from the types of misconceptions that most frequently appeared in the quizzes and oral interviews to the types of misconception that most frequently appeared in the unit tests. Finally, using interviews and quizzes addressing the same material, I will compare the misconceptions I identified and analyzed using the oral interviews to the misconceptions I identified and analyzed using the short quizzes.