Friday, April 5, 2013

Final Report

I'm sitting here at the Alumni Conference for my Fulbright Program and I realized that I never shared my results. Mea culpa! Here it is: Final Product

A few quick footnotes...
-My deadline was the end of August. I didn't get the final post-test data until November/December, and didn't analyze it until the holiday break. So the report shared above does not include this data, but it does discuss the results of the surveys that the students completed, the pre-test data, and my observations about the schools I visited, the teachers I worked with, and the educational system in general.

-My mentor Julio and I finally got the chance to discuss the results and implications via Skype in early 2013. We discussed the particularly low conceptual gains and what might be responsible for these results and may pursue this avenue of research in the future.

To sum it all up, the original question I set out to answer was:

Can values-affirmation reflective writing activities help reduce the gender gap in conceptual gains in high school physics students?

It remains unanswered because the conceptual gains were so low that statistically there was no difference between the control group and values affirmation groups. This is disappointing, but I hope to continue this thread of research.

Thank you to everyone for your support and interest! ¡Un abrazo!