Using Connected Curriculum Project Modules - Sources of data

Author(s): 
John Hannah

Data on students' attitudes were collected in two open-ended surveys conducted during normal lecture time, one at the end of the first half of the course -- before any of the CCP materials had been used -- and the second just before the end of the course. Copies of the survey questions can be seen in the Appendix. Such surveys provide quite limited information, of course, compared with interviews. Furthermore these surveys sought a picture of the course as a whole -- as a part of my own course development strategy -- so only a fraction of the responses deal with the CCP modules. However the students' responses provide a first glimpse of how they viewed the CCP learning experience.

Both surveys were completed by 96 of the 107 students taking part in the course. To get a reliable picture of the students' responses I coded and categorised them following the recommendations in Miles and Huberman. This is similar in spirit to the grounded theory approach in Bookman and Malone, in that the data generate the categories to be discussed. All student quotes in the following sections come from the second survey, the numbers indicating which survey form the comments come from.

My own observations come from grading the students' final submissions, along with recall of incidents that occurred while I was tutoring in the laboratory sessions, and which were recorded after comparing experiences with the other two tutors at our weekly debriefing session. (I was the tutor for two of the six weekly sessions, and helped in the other four for the first two modules.)