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
update
Project Updates
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:
- So far, we’ve gotten four interviews completed. We’re 1/6 of the way through! Each interview has been fascinating in its own way and we’ve learned a lot, about those students, their engagement experiences, and Penn State.
- Ally and I are putting final touches on our slides for the Student Engagement Network Summit, coming up on November 13. We are going to have a chance to run through it with my department, Library Learning Services, before the real deal. We will also share the slides on this website, once they’re ready to go.
- Beyond emailing students and setting up emails, we’ve also been reviewing a lot of the Faculty Senate documentation, starting in 2010, around student engagement experiences. This work is helping to frame our research, and better understand the work done before us that has led to the Student Engagement Network and the 10 opportunity types. It has been neat to get Ally’s take on these reports!
Ideally, we’d love to close out 2019 with 12 of the 24 interviews completed. We’ll see how we do!
Building our data set to recruit our participants: A work in progress
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?
Research in Collaboration: Why I’m talking about my research
If you know me or have collaborated with me before, you know I have a certain energy when I’m really jazzed about something. The sort of energy where you can truly sense my enthusiasm as it oozes out of me. And when I begin, I give you a look that says, “Buckle up, I’m jazzed and you’re about to know why.”
Right now, I feel that way about this research project. As Ally mentioned, we have been testing out our questions and the mapping activity itself. We’ve done four practice interviews and I feel my head is full of ideas. I see so many connections from these interviews to the theory that exists within higher education on student engagement, and to the educational framework that the Student Engagement Network (and Penn State Faculty Senate) has been working on for years. I can only imagine what sort of information we’ll have to share once we’ve done the 24, on-the-record, interviews. I believe this project has tremendous potential, and the interviews we’ve done so far have confirmed that.