I embarked this semester on a mission. Specifically, a mission for a further learning program through my district, but a mission nonetheless! I was going to use data to analyze my how effective my teaching has been to help foster a growth mindset in students and make them stronger critical thinkers.
The first step was how would I collect said data? Good question, unembodied voice in my head. I decided to utilize one of the tools I used on occasion last year and hadn't really fully utilized until this year: Google Forms. I created a Form for students to fill out after every test reflecting on a few things: how they studied, what worked best for them, how prepared they felt, and later, different aspects of growth mindset based on an effective effort survey I found. About 90% of my students (which is a pretty good percent, all things considered) filled out this test reflection after each of the five tests so far this semester. It became part of the class culture, and I would address any concerns from them during class time and let them know how it shaped my decisions. As I showed them I used the data, they gave me very honest answers and examples.
Here's the thing: the reflection is probably 10 questions long (some fill in the blank, mostly multiple choice) and I have 160 students who have taken 5 tests so far, plus a test to come and the final. To summarize, I have a lot of data. Plus, I have data on their test performance over all to compare it to. That's a lot of stuff to go through, and going through question by question to graph or analyze it is tricking to say the least. I knew I wanted to do something meaningful with this data and draw an actual conclusion (maybe write a paper, who knows?) but the task of going through frankly mountains data with limited assistance sounded like exactly zero fun.
I decided to do some research about how to analyze my research quickly. Turns out the explore function on Google Sheets is a godsend. Just click it. Believe me. You can ask questions about your data, you can get charts about specific questions from the form, you can get counts to use in other things. One thing I plan to do is to graph a change in what students think works best for them to learn and see how it fits Growth Mindset principles and then chart next steps, and I can absolutely do that. The explore function is one of the most powerful data collection tools I've ever seen, and I actually plan on showing it to my students for their own data analysis.
And yes, you read that aside right. I'm thinking about continuing to collect and analyze data and lesson plans to maybe write an article for either NSTA or AAPT. It's a dream more than anything, but it's nice to have a goal in mind for all of this data.
