Research+Methodology

A mixed research approach will be used. This approach was chosen to assess the effect of blogging on test scores and student engagement. The study will involve two reading instruction classes; one class is the control group, and the other is the experimental group. The researcher will be the instructor for the experimental group which will use blogging during discussion time, and another teacher will lead the control class in vocal discussion. The control group teacher will be given instructions on how to conduct reading and discussion during the experiment to prevent her from giving any unintended help. All students, both experimental and controlled, will read (silently in class) a portion of the chapter book // Number the Stars // by Lois Lowry as the teacher reads the same passages aloud. This should prevent any individual reading difficulties from skewing the statistics. ** Data   ** // Edhelper // (a website created by teachers for teachers’ use is found at edhelper.com) will be used to create a set of discussion questions, and pretests and posttests with multiple choice questions each for the students to answer. A checklist will be used to assess student engagement during discussion time. ** Data Collection Strategy  ** Both the control group and the experimental group will receive a pretest after the class reading to assess their comprehension before beginning discussion. Both groups of students will receive the same set of discussion questions. The pretest will be given after class reads chapters 1-4 of the book prior to discussion to determine how much they learned from reading. Then discussion questions will be presented for the class to work on collectively to find the answers. The control class will use traditional ways to answer and discuss. The experimental class will receive a set of questions on the blog for students to discuss/blog with one another. In neither class will the teacher give assistance on the discussion. After discussion, each group will be given a posttest, which will be similar to the pretest, to determine how much comprehension improved through each method.The same procedure will be done for chapters 5-9, 10-13, and 14-17. In both classrooms, the researcher will use a checklist (Appendix) to rank the level of engagement of students while they are completing assignments. After completing the four sets of pretests, discussions, and posttests, the variation of scores from each set of pretest/posttests will be analyzed and charted to evaluate separate achievements of traditional and technology-based classrooms to determine if there is a statistically significant improvement of blogging over the non-blogging reading classroom. First, the researcher will determine if the data follows the normal curve. As found in Johnson and Christensen (2008), if the data curve is normal, the researcher will conduct a t-test with a significance level of .05 to test the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is that the blogging and non-blogging classrooms on reading comprehension have no apparent difference. If the null hypothesis is rejected, then the researcher will have found that blogging does have an impact on reading comprehension. A statistics analysis software program called // Minitab // will be used to analyze the data. The researcher will also collect checklists and analyze the data to reveal the effect of blogging on student engagement. The t-test will be used to determine if there is a significant difference between the average rankings of student engagement for each class.
 * Design and Procedures **
 * Data Analysis **