Hypothesis
In-person learners have higher test scores than virtual learners.
I am going to conduct a quantitative experiment that looks at math test scores of in-person vs virtual middle school students. I want to know if in-person students are more successful than virtual students. The purpose of this experiment is to see if virtual interventions are successful in helping middle school students understand math concepts.
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- There are a total of 24 students who will participate in my experiment. They are split into two groups, one is the intervention group and the other is the comparison group.
- The intervention group consists of exclusively virtual learners and the comparison groups consists of exclusively in-person learners.
- I, the teacher, will conduct a unit pretest, provide homework assignments, and give quizzes to both sets of students throughout the experiment.
- Over the course of a month and a half, the intervention group will receive instruction through pre-recorded videos, complete math problems on IXL, and complete homework assignments through a program called Formative. The comparison group will receive instruction via a live teacher, practice the content by completing math problems in class, and complete homework assignments on paper.
- At the end of the month and a half, I will conduct a unit test/posttest.
Research Approach
Virtual learning for middle school students is a very new concept that did not become popular until the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year. Because of this, there is not a lot of research on the topic at the secondary level. There is, however, quite a bit of research on virtual learning at the college level and some of this is helpful to my own study.
A quantitative, nonexperimental study will work best to help answer my research question.
I will be studying middle school students and will be drawing from a pool of students who are in low-level, on-level, and advanced math classes. While I do not have the resources to obtain samples from different schools, I feel that this would be the best approach to obtain an unbiased group of students.
Method of Measurement
The best instrument of measurement is to give students a unit pretest and posttest. This will allow me to see how much knowledge they are coming into the unit with and how much they obtain during the month and a half-long experiment.