4 keys ideas from Dervin
At this point I am having a difficult time relating Dervin to Baggio. One connection I saw was on page 6 of chapter 1 in the Baggio book. It mentions that adults need to know why they are learning something and their experiences play a role in their learning. Adults have a strong sense of self and make their own decisions about learning. I think this relates to wahat Dervin was suggesting for focusing on the user or the actor in your research (which could be children or adults) and also understanding that all of our actors/users have their own different experiences and learning styles they are bringing to our classroom and have a different way of making sense of content and information.
0 Comments
Completing the action research in my classroom last semester reminded me a lot of doing cycles of inquiry but in a much more formal manner. My first teaching job was at a high school and we often completed cycles of inquiry in our classrooms. We would identify a problem or area that we wanted to improve and then we would perform an action and evaluate how well it solved the problem. We would then decide if we would want to perform a second cycle on the same problem or identify a new problem. I sincerely enjoyed collecting the data that I did from my action research project. It was interesting to be able to see trends in the data amongst my 160 students. It was very challenging to conduct the research required for the paper we wrote. There had not been very much research performed on students digital literacy skills. Moving forward, I much preferred the more casual cycle of inquiry. Writing this blog made me realize that even though I do not write 18 page papers in my classroom, I am conducting cycles of inquiry and mini action research projects weekly if not daily in my classroom. There are always problems that we identify with a specific student, a specific content standard or even a classroom management challenge. As a teacher we ask other teachers, read some articles on the topic and make a plan moving forward. We then reflect on how well our actions worked in solving the problem. In my opinion, teachers are experimenters and researchers on a daily basis. The thing that has stood out the most to me from the reading of Dervin is her focus on the researcher focusing on the user. Researchers should use methods and language that is familiar to the user. I think this is so important to our research as teachers. I often give out surveys to my students, even before this class, to collect data on how students liked or disliked a certain unit, tool, or method in my classroom. I always tried to put the language in the simplest forms so that the students would feel comfortable sharing with me how they felt. Once I established this culture with my students, they felt much more comfortable and free to share with me constructive criticism that has helped me develop my curriculum. I think surveys like these can be given by teachers to help understand how students are making sense of information or bridging a gap. I gave Brenda Dervin's "From the Minds Eye of the User" 2 reads. I still have a LONG way to go in fully understanding what she has to share about sense making and how this can be used to further my research. As I read through the text I kept trying to think about how this could relate to my classroom and my teaching practice.
On page 64 Dervin explains that studies should include how a user or human actor acquired or made sense of the information. Researchers should not just analyze if an answer is correct or for a certain piece of information. Rather, questions should be asked about how a user made sense of the information or found a piece of information to be accurate. This section stood out to me as a teacher because We should all be interested in learning more about how our students are learning and making sense of the content in our classes, not just the correct answer. As a science teacher, how are my students determining if something is accurate and what criteria are they using to decide if something is not accurate. Dervin suggests that actors are trying to bridge a gap of discontinuity. At the moment I am the human actor who is trying to bridge a gap in understanding sense making. I am now trying to chose the right tactic to bridge that gap. If I can understand sensemaking and overcome the situation I am in right now, I can become a better teacher researcher. I am hoping the conversations that we have in the upcoming classes and future reads of this text will help answer questions that I have and strategies to understand it. Dergin provides several visual examples of this "gap bridging" and shows that it can be linear or more of a cycle. Sense making seems to be mostly tied to data collection. The idea of research interviews was discussed. The research interview is much better at getting into the decision making process that the actor goes through as they try to obtain information and bridge a gap. There are several interviewing methods discussed in the chapter to help get to this type of information during an interview. The sample exemplars were also helpful in seeing how these strategies could be used in research. I was surprised to read that only 40 sense making studies had been conducted at the time that this book was written. As I read through the text, I was trying to make sense of her information by trying to relate it to gaps that my students may have. My research in the last semester was focused on students digital literacy. I came up with this research project because I see many gaps that my students have in their skills and knowledge of how to properly and efficiently use the internet. I would say part of my goal of the pretest I gave my students in my action research project was to identify gaps in their ability to evaluate websites for credibility. I could see how a research interview could have provided me with more information about how students perceived the gap, how they intended to bridge the gap and strategies and tactics that they currently used. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2018
Categories |