Ed 603 - Assignment 8

For this eighth assignment for Ed 603, you are going to write the Subjects and Instruments sections of your research proposal.

Specific Format for Completing the Lesson 8 Assignment and sending it to the Ed 603 Instructor

You should create a word processing document for the assignment. As you did for previous assignments, at the top of the page, on the first line record the following: Ed 603, Lesson 8 Assignment. On the second line record your name and student number at MSUM (if you have one). On the third line record the date you completed the assignment.

In the assignment you should include the following items or components of your research plan, in the order given:

  1. Subjects (Research Participants):
    In this section of your research proposal you will want to define the population in such a way as to describe its size and relevant characteristics (such as age, ability, and socioeconomic status).

You should describe the procedure you used to select the study participants. Also describe how they will be selected for each subgroup.

An example for this section, taken from your textbook (Gay & Airasian, 2000, page 143) is as follows:

Subjects:

Participants in this study will be selected from the population of 10th-grade biology students at an upper-middle-class all-girl Catholic high school in Miami, Florida. The student population is multicultural, reflecting the diverse ethnic groups in Dade County. The student body is composed of approximately 90% Hispanic students from a variety of Latin American backgrounds, the major one being Cuban, 9% Caucasian non-Hispanic students, and 1% African-American students. The population is anticipated to contain approximatelly 200 biology students.

Prior to the beginning of the school year, before students have been scheduled, 60 students will be randomly selected (using a table of random numbers) and randomly assigned to 2 classes of 30 each, 30 is the normal class size. One of the classes will be randomly chosen to receive IMM instruction and other will not.

  1. Instruments:

In this section you will want to describe the instruments you will be using in your study to measure the variables you have defined and described in the hypothesis section of your paper. Your text authors suggest that you should include the following in this section of your paper:

 

 

An example for this section, taken from your textbook (Gay & Airasian, 2000, page 560) is as follows:

Instrument:

The biology test of the National Proficiency Survey Series (NPSS) was used as the measuring instrument. The test was designed to measure individual student performance in biology at the high school level but the publishers also recommended it as an evaluation of instructional programs. Content validity is good; items were selected from a large item bank provided by classroom teachers and curriculum experts. High school instructional materials and a national curriculum survey were extensively reviewed before objectives were written. The test objectives and those of the biology classes in the study were highly correlated. Although the standard error of measurement is not given for the biology test, the range of KR-20s for the entire battery is from .82 to .91 with a median of .86. This is satisfactory since the purpose of the test was to evaluate instructional programs not to make decisions concerning individuals. Catholic school students were included in the battery norming procedures which were carried out in April and May of 1988 using 22,616 students in grades 9-12 from 45 high schools in 20 states.

Qualitative Research Plan (optional): If you are doing a qualitative research plan for your major project for Ed 603, do the above assignment, but in addition read pages 197-255 in the Gay & Airasian (7th Edition) text – “Step 4 Data Collection.”

After you have completed the assignment (and saved it on your computer) send e-mail to your instructor indicating that you are sending the lesson 8 assignment in and then attach the file for the assignment to your email message. The e-mail address for the instructor, John Wasson, is wassonj@teleport.com


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