Research Week 2

This week proved to be a challenging one for me. When I received Amy's feedback on my topic paper, I was overwhelmed at the number of times she asked "source?" I found this difficult to approach because my sources were... me!

So I sat down 3 separate times last week during literacy (40 minutes each) to look for "sources." I searched for topics like "self-regulation," "e-portfolios in math," and "middle school math retention," all without much luck. I wasn't finding any sources that would back me up. On Friday I had a better idea: I would look at my topic paper comments differently. This time, I went through and made a note of what was being said in the paper when Amy wrote "source?" Wouldn't you know, I wasn't talking about "self-regulation," "e-portfolios in math," and "middle school math retention!" I needed to be looking for sources that supported my discussion on math building on itself.

So, I spent all day Saturday and Sunday looking for sources on math building on itself. I had trouble finding the right phrases. I tried "importance of prior knowledge," "scaffolding in mathematics," and "mathematics builds on itself," but I wasn't finding the sources that I needed. I started bouncing ideas off of my mom about keywords I could search for, and the word "cumulative" came up in our conversation. So I started searching for "math +cumulative discipline," and started getting a little more than before. But I still wasn't getting exactly what I needed. I took a long shot and jumped over to google to look for another phrase, by searching "math is cumulative." Well wouldn't you know, one of the first results I got was our dear friend Gagne! 

Apparently, way back in 1968, Gagne proposed his idea of "cumulative learning." He said that cumulative learning takes place in many subjects, and that if you don't have the appropriate lower level concepts, you will be unable to complete a higher level task that incorporates the lower level one. You would have thought that I had won the lottery. I suddenly had a source, and a pretty strong one at that. 

From there, things were looking up! I spent another hour or so, perfecting my topic paper and adding in-text citations and references. 

I can't tell you how motivating it was to finally have a good grasp on my topic. I decided to take another hour or so to do the same work for my needs analysis revision. I added an introduction paragraph to it, which called for more sources (but at this point I was on a research roll). 

I feel like this week was important for me. Not only did I get my work completed, but I finally feel like my capstone idea is really starting to come together! 

And so it begins...

This week, I officially started my capstone research. This brought on a few emotions. I am excited to finally reach the culmination of the MAIT program, and to implement my plan for improving an aspect of my teaching. It also brought on the stress of knowing that the next two semesters will be quite a bit of work.

I started by putting my topic idea into words last week. Doing so made things seem much more serious. But like I said, I'm excited to get to work on my research!

What took a bit more time was getting to work on my topic paper. I've always struggled to elaborate in my writing; but I do find that when I am given an outline to follow it makes things much easier to undertake. (Thanks Amy!) Stating the gap and proposed solution has me excited to start researching topics such as e-portfolios and self regulation in education (which is what I plan to do more of this week).