Research Method

For my research I plan to conduct an experiment to gauge how effect twitter is on classroom engagement. Preferably, the experiment would take place at a diverse college/university in the US. Within that college/university, I would take two similar classrooms in subject matter, and size with close attention paid to ethnic and gender presence within the different classrooms. These two classrooms would be randomly chosen to be a control group and one to be the manipulated group. The control group would use standard classical teaching methods without Twitter, while the manipulated group would incorporate Twitter into the agenda. To determine the liking, usefulness and effectiveness of Twitter in the classroom, I would use survey and interviews to evaluate student response. I think it would also be necessary to administer both a pre-test and post-test for the manipulated group. Questions in the pretest would read something like this:

1.     What teaching methods do you believe engage you the most? The least?

2.     From 1 – 10, how would you rate your class participation in this class? (1 being very poor, to 10 being exceptional.)

3.     What are ways that you believe professors could make class more engaging?

4.     Are you familiar with Twitter?

5.     Have you ever used Twitter in a previous class? Thoughts?

-       If not, do you feel it would help students be more engaged?

For each classroom, I would observe classroom engagement and participation among students throughout one semester. If Twitter seems to be engaging students, a second run of the experiment should be run to solidify results. At the end of the semester, a post-test would be run and the questions would read something like this:

1.     From 1-10, how would you rate your class participation in this class? (1 being very poor, to 10 being exceptional.)

2.     If you have improved since the beginning of the semester, detail why?

3.     How would you evaluate the use of Twitter in your class? Do you prefer it to more standard teaching methods? Why or why not?

After I have recorded all of my observations from the two classes from the semester, I will evaluate the responses and look at a content analysis of the tweets by the manipulated classroom. It would be exceptionally interesting to try this experiment in different educational settings, different locations, and differing ethnicities.