Andrea's Portfolio

A Quantitative Approach

Another required course in the Educational Technology Leadership (ETL) program is Introduction to Quantitative Research, a course that gives an overview of both quantitative and qualitative research. For the main research assignment (an assignment that was completed in pieces throughout the course of the semester), I decided to develop a quantitative research project proposal investigating self-regulated and twenty-first century learning skills in a project-based learning (PBL) environment. The proposal would analyze student performance on grade-level based standardized assessments. I chose this topic mainly because it is something we were looking into within our school environment.

 

The Colorado STEM Academy uses project-based learning as its primary method of instruction, yet our students are assessed on standardized state and district mandated tests. We informally assess self-regulated and twenty-first century skills, yet have not looked at the correlation between the skills and test performance in our PBL environment. For these reasons, this school was a great candidate for the research project proposal. 

 

This research paper not only highlights the learning that has taken place in the Educational Technology and Leadership program at The George Washington University, but it also highlight my expertise in PBL. Throughout the ETL program, I have connected my learning to my teaching (I also wrote a research paper on game-based learning, a method I have also used in my class). 

 

A Research Proposal

While this paper is a proposal rather than actual research I conducted, I think it shows a well thought out plan for how we can use the data from PBL and standardized assessments to evaluate both instruction and learning. I am not sure if I will ever find myself in the research field, however I think the information that could be gained from a research proposal such as this could be valuable. I have often informally assessed my students using critical thinking, creativity and collaboration rubrics from The Buck Institute for Education with my students. Typically, students with higher critical thinking skills perform better on our classroom assessments, but we have yet you analyze whether or not this is true of standardized assessments.