Weekly Journal
Week of November 29- December 7th, 2008
Amelia Weigant: This week I finished up and submitted my literature review. Writing literature reviews is a completely new experience for me so it was quite difficult. However I believe I created a strong paper. We will get our revised literature reviews back within the next 1-2 weeks so we can submit a final version.
Teresa Sundholdm: This week I sent the first draft of my section of the literature review to our advisors for feedback. I believe it is a good first draft. It was difficult to write as in our research I was unable to find much detail about the actual features of the games being studied, just the learning outcomes of the students. I hope that in our study we are able to include more about the features of the games themselves.
Week of November 15- November 21, 2008
Amelia Weigant:This week I went to Salinas Boys and Girls Club to tour the facility and speak with the program coordinators about the research we plan to conduct there. I also worked more on my portion of the literature review. I used Patryse's helpful outline to guide my article choices. We will be compiling the different parts of the literature review tomorrow. After the different parts are assembled, we will edit them as a group to make a single, strong literature review paper.
Patryse Brownstephens: I reviewed more material for the article, mentally organized a possible approach. I still feel confident that we have enough information to construct a great report.
Teresa Sundholdm: This week I struggled to narrow down our research to the section that I am writing for our literature review. I am going to take more time to focus on making sure that what I am writing about pertains directly to our research and that it is focused on computer games rather than other forms of learning. Once I feel that I have gathered the correct sources then I will be able to write my section.
Week of November 8- November 14, 2008
Amelia Weigant: I received my sections of the research paper and have begun to collect the appropriate articles. The requirements of the paper are very straightfoward. I will work on the rough draft so I can submit it for approval.
Patryse Brownstephens: We have distributed the sections of the research paper that each of us will cover. I look forward to writing the research paper. Writing is my field of expertise; this is where I desire most to contribute to the research. We discussed, last week, the requirements of the paper, answering all questions. I think we will proceed with confidence; we were initially a little concerned about the complex subject matter and wondered how to extract our information from such technical and lengthy documents.
Teresa Sundholdm: This week I began re-reading articles for our literature review. I will be writing a section of our review pertaining to the technical and design aspects of computer games and how these elements affect learning when children use them. I will need to narrow down all the information gathered to just the parts that pertain to my section and that will take some time.
Week of November 2- November 7, 2008
Amelia Weigant: This week we received the Literature Research outline and I looked over it carefully. Each student was assigned different portions of the outline. Teresa and I are working on the technical portions and Patryse is completing the non-technical portions. The Literature Research outline rough draft will be completed in roughly 2-3 weeks. I have begun outlining my sections and rereading the articles that we have compiled.
Patryse Brownstephens: This week, I reviewed the outline for the literature review. I contemplated new sub topics that we can cover in our review. We are going to need the guidelines from Cathy (previously discussed) to ensure that we are gathering the necessary information for the paper. I look forward to writing the paper. We need to discuss the outline and gather our input before we can proceed.
Teresa Sundholdm: This week I created a web banner for our web site to reflect our research on computer games and learning. I also reviewed Patryse's work on the literature review outline in preparation for our discussion of it at our meeting this week.
Week of October 26- November 2, 2008
Amelia Weigant: This week I helped collaborate with Teresa to finalize a list of questions for the teacher survey. We are also continuing to review the different game selections. We are awaiting the installation of computer hardware at our first research site. Once the hardware is installed we can begin collecting research data at the preschool.
Teresa Sundholdm: This week I worked on the first draft of our Teacher survey. I combined my list of questions with Amelia's and sent the draft to our advisors for review. I sent the finished survey, teacher consent form, and the final answers of the questions to Dr. Lieberman, who is overseeing our research for MRO-W. I discussed options for different games to be used in our research with our advisors and the other student researchers.
Week of October 19-26, 2008
Amelia Weigant: This week I collaborated with Teresa on compiling a list of questions for the game effectiveness questionnaire. We are continuing to review games that would satisfy the requirements of this project. We have discussed more than one option, including writing the game ourselves, purchasing a retail game, or using free web-based games.
Teresa Sundholdm: This week I worked with my faculty advisor to answer questions we received about our Human Subjects application. We discussed the questions and worked on answering them in a clear and detailed way. I also continued my article research, but did not find any articles I thought were relevant this week.
Week of October 11-18, 2008
Patryse Brownstephens: I am still discovering new terms that will be useful in my topic searches. I feel that I was just getting into a routine and gaining a better understanding of how to search - just as it is time to move forward to another part of the information gathering task.
This week marks the end of searching out material and moving onward to reviewing the material that I've gathered.
Amelia Weigant: This week I narrowed down my research to specifically focus on the effects of learning games on very young children. We are going to begin our study at the preschool very soon so this newly focused research will help provide us with valuable tools. I read three new articles this week that dealt specifically with preschool and kindergarten aged children. It appears it is harder to test the effects of learning on young children because they tend to make more mistakes in answering questions. I went to the library to try new methods of searching, because I have exhausted the list of online articles I found through Google. The librarian helped teach me about the university's article system and I was able to find many relevant results.
Teresa Sundholm: This week I continued looking for articles to support the literature review. I also reviewed two websites on how to write a literature review, as I have never done one before. We are currently waiting on the installation of a computer at the day care center so we can begin the observation part of the project.
Week of October 3-10, 2008
Patryse Brownstephens:This week, I found a search term that brought up much more information: Early Childhood Education, Software. I found this term in the description column of another article. Thus far, the ECE, Software has been the most successful in bringing up pertinent material. I also utilized a citation from one of the documents I located under the ECE, Software search. It led to one great source. This week was the fastest my search has gone.
Amelia Weigant: This week I worked on the project's website, and read more articles. I changed the look and feel of the site, and collected bios from my fellow researchers and posted them online. I have read 5 articles documenting the effects of learning games on children and adults, but only 3 of the articles were relevant. Next week we will visit the daycare center that we will be conducting research at. We cannot begin collecting data this week because we are waiting for the chilrens' permission slips to be returned to us.
Teresa Sundholm: This week I was more successful in my search for articles. I narrowed the focus down to pre-school age children. I found more articles, both on Google Scholar and in the Eric database. The search terms I found to be most successful were a combination of:
- computer assisted instruction (learning)
- pre-school
- early childhood education
I am interested to see how our research progresses once we start observing the children at the daycare center. I am curious to see what our findings will be in comparison to the studies I have read about so far.
Week of September 26-October 3, 2008
Patryse Brownstephens: I worked with a librarian to locate information that fit within our search terms. She suggested that I truncate certain words (shift + 8) to bring in more results. It didn't help much. However, I did find that some key words did yield more information within the Eric Database. Last week, the group recommended that I use the Eric Database rather than the Elite Database. That recommendation also yielded more results.
Amelia Weigant: This week I spent roughly 6 hours working on the research project's official website, which is nearly ready to be published. I read several articles highlighting different aspects of learning games for children. I tried to focus the chosen articles on the effects the games have on the childrens' test scores and what methods the researchers used to measure the increased learning. Reading the articles and writing the synopsis took up the rest of my time working. Tomorrow I am going to a nearby preschool to help investigate and take notes on the location. We are hoping to find that this site will be an ideal research location.
Teresa Sundholm: This week I read two articles and wrote summaries for them. I also wrote the first draft of the Parental Consent forms for signature of the parents of the children participating in the CSUMB day-care center part of our research. I am continuing to gather articles for the literature review.
Weeks of September 1-26, 2008
Amelia Weigant: I learned how to conduct literature reviews. I read several articles but only 3 of them applied to the project. I am slowly becoming better at narrowing down my searches. I also completed the Human Subjects Research Certification from San Diego State University. It was challenging to complete but I was successful on my first try. I learned a lot about appropriate research conduct while working on the certification, and I will be sure to apply what I've learned in the coming months.
Teresa Sundholm: Over the first few weeks of the research project, I took the online certification test, met with our group and discussed how the research would be conducted, worked with a librarian on how to do research for the literature review, completed rough drafts of the Human Subjects Application and the Parental Consent Form for my advisors review, and gathered articles with summaries for the literature review.
As I have never done a research project before, it has been an interesting and overall enjoyable experience. I liked working on the Human Subjects Application as it gave me a good overview of our project and clarified all the research questions we are going to be working on getting answers to. It has been informative to read about the studies that have been done before and I look forward to seeing any similarities and differences in our study by comparison.