Good news — we’ve upgraded our research website. You can now follow all of our research progress at https://mappingstudentengagement.com/.
We’re excited to continue this work and we hope you’ll continue to follow up on our new platform!
– Hailley & Ally
Hi everyone, it’s Ally! I figured it was time for a blog post – it’s been a while since my last post and a lot has changed recently. First, COVID-19 has impacted our work these past few months. Like many others, Hailley and I have been working from home, navigating Zoom, and creating new, virtual techniques to keep this project moving. Fortunately, this project has continued fairly smoothly online. We completed our last four interviews via Zoom and consistently have Zoom meetings to stay on track. We also had some fascinating conversations with interviewees about how COVID-19 has affected their student engagement opportunities. We’re definitely eager to tie those student perspectives into our manuscripts moving forward.
Our project is also facing changes outside of COVID-19. Now that our interviews are complete and coding is almost finished, it’s time to start analyzing our results and decide how to present this information. Hailley and I decided to first focus on creating a research report for the Penn State Student Engagement Network. This report will include the demographics of our sample, the methods we used, guidance on how to read a map, and commentary on how students are interpreting the ten categories of student engagement experiences. Additionally, we’re hoping to provide general takeaways from our data, such as what students get involved with during their first year at Penn State. Finally, Hailley and I will create a list of recommendations for the Student Engagement Network to consider on how to best support Penn State students during their student engagement journeys. I started working on this report this week and can’t wait to see it all come together!
[Impatient Olson twins GIF via GIPHY]
After gathering important results for the Student Engagement Network, we’ll focus more on manuscripts for publication. This will be a really exciting aspect of this project because we have so much data to choose from! We can write about our library results, the growth areas from the Student Engagement Network, the students who weren’t as involved during their first year, my perspective as an undergraduate research assistant, and more. Hailley and I are hoping to write for multiple journals to capture various perspectives of our project. I’m really excited for these next steps. Our project has come a long way, and I’m ready to tie it all together with some writing!
[busy daffy duck GIF via GIPHY]
Today, April 16, 2020, Ally and I completed our 24th and final interview of this data collection phase. We chatted with a great College of Nursing student and celebrated with a virtual high-five.
Ilana and Abbi high-fiving, via GIPHY
Like many other universities across the United State, Penn State has moved the rest of our semester online. Ally and I have both started teleworking and today is week two of being remote. We wanted to share some project updates and how we’ll move forward without having any more face-to-face time this semester.
We feel lucky that by Spring Break, we had conducted 20 out of our 24 interviews. These interviews have been transcribed and as Ally talked about in her last post, we’ve created detailed maps to help us better understand (and remember) each student engagement journey. In addition, during the first part of this semester, Ally and I created our codebook and began to do some norming with a few interviews. This means that our transition to virtual has been pretty smooth. We’re meeting via Zoom on a regular basis and much of Ally’s work (coding) can be done independently and on a schedule that works best for her.
In addition to coding, we plan on doing some writing, compiling information on the maps for the Student Engagement Network, and creating a protocol for our last four interviews. I feel optimistic that we can get those final four interviews completed, we’ll just need to get creative about the map part. And, there’s a chance we might be interviewing a student whose engagement experience was cut short due to COVID-19. That would definitely give the map something unique and also plays well into “the cloud,” one of our guiding frameworks from Ella Kahu (2013). The one college we haven’t been able to get any interviewees is the College of Nursing and I feel that moving our interviews online might help us get two willing and available students. Stay tuned!
We’re back! 2020 is starting off fast and furious and here at Penn State and we are just beginning week three of the semester. It has been wonderful to have Ally back in the office and we are ready to conquer the second half of this project. Some of our work has stayed the same (recruiting students and interviewing them) and other parts are new (analyzing the interview transcripts, writing manuscripts, and presentations). Lucky, we have a great support system, within the Libraries, at the Student Engagement Network, and with colleagues in the LIS field to help and encourage us as we move into these new parts.
It’s Fall Break here at Penn State and things have been extra quiet in the library. For me, this break means shifting my focus to some bigger projects (like undergraduate research) without being pulled in a million different meeting directions. It’s a needed lull, but I will say that I miss the students and chatting about this project with Ally!
This morning, I sent out the sixth round of recruitment emails. Up until today, Ally and I had been only emailing a handful of our potential subjects, trying to take it a few colleges at a time. We felt that was a way to keep everything manageable and it has worked well so far. However, as we look at our completed interviews (6) versus the ones still left (18), we figured we should try to kick things into a little higher gear. 18 students across 11 colleges received an email from me today. Hopefully a few will be interested and Ally will come back to some scheduled interviews. After this round, we plan on doing two more recruitment periods before December 20, the last day of finals. I’m hoping that as the semester comes to a close, more students will have free time and interest in participating. Ideally, we’re trying to have 12 interviews completed by the end of 2019. It seems possible. We hope.
Hello all! As you can see, lots of exciting things have been happening with our project. Ally and I are deep in recruiting and interviewing students. It felt appropriate to do a little update:
Ideally, we’d love to close out 2019 with 12 of the 24 interviews completed. We’ll see how we do!
Yesterday, Ally and I sent out our first round of recruitment emails.
[Linda Belcher excitedly waving her hands, via GIPHY]
As we anxiously check to see if any have responded to our inquiry, it’s probably a good time to return to the question of: how are recruiting these students? What did we end up with for our data set?
Hello all! It has been a minute, but lots of exciting things are happening with our research project:
Ally and I were so jazzed on Friday, we decided to pilot the interview protocol. I was able to interview Ally about her student engagement experiences. The interview was about an hour and fifteen minutes long. That means we’re in the ballpark with time, and we both learned a lot from the experience. This upcoming week, we’ll be tweaking the interview questions and then piloting the revised questions with some students we know.
As you can see, we’re moving and grooving. Stay tuned for more information and updates!