Response to Survey Questions

Looking over the questions again, I can see where they can touch upon many different aspects of motivation, from the simple case of class participation and assignment completion to the more complicated, yet substantially important, issues of topic interest and college financing. These questions will, no doubt, help us more fully analyze the sources of motivation for students. One thing we are lacking, however, is a direction to take on this study. Perhaps this isn't such a bad thing right now...

Chris mentioned his preference to do a series of more intensive studies on fewer individuals as opposed to a large scale study to determine the motivation of the non-existent "average person." I believe this approach will greatly limit the use of a self-report survey, like the one we worked on today. Although I have my reservations about this approach (perhaps saved for another blog entry), I think we can still utilize a survey prior to engaging in our mini case studies.

A case study without a focus is simply a list of observations. If we can use this survey on a large number of students before we start observing individuals, we might be able to see a faint outline of a hypothesis forming. For example, if we give the survey out and see that females tend to report themselves as more motivated than males did, then we can test that against our smaller group through our more objective observations. It is sort of like a post-hoc hypothesis, if that makes any sense. We can use this approach to test any other trends we notice in the survey, too.

These are just my thoughts on the matter... I hate going into a situation without a plan or defined purpose, so perhaps this will help us overcome that problem. With that in mind, I'd like to propose that we make sure we ask for majors and genders on each survey, to help track any possible correlations that might be found there. Also, I think that these surveys should be handed out in classes and not randomly, so questions can be answered about that specific class. Finally, I think that we need to design as many questions as we can to be categorical, as in having them circle either Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, or All the Time, to avoid untrue dichotomies of yes and no, where it is applicable. Perhaps we can also assign them numeric values to correspond to the category... we know how scientists love their numbers.

I hope these thoughts are helpful, I can see this study being very interesting when we actually do it :)

~ Bryon