Service Learning 10 HR

My service learning started last week at Citrus College. I was able to shadow a professor who teaches Astronomy and who has helped me a lot in my science fair project as well. I have accomplished exactly 10 hours this week doing an educational research project. I have not been in the class environment because the professor doesn't teach on the winter session. But hopefully I'll be entering her class in spring and experiencing the feeling of the environment. Moreover, the educational research project we have been conducting has been very hard to accomplished. The objective is to analyze the student's test scores to find some connections that might help understand the student's performance in the class. I have analyzed data, formulas, graphs, and understanding the numbers in order to come with ideas and anwers towards our objective. We have found some answers to our questions, but there is still much more to do to expand more in depth the data we have gathered. I wanted to say that I found out that the school board(whole staff) wants the professor and I to present what we have found. I am currently working on the presentation as well and making sure we are understanding the data, the subject, and all that. We have so much to do that it's going to take us a good amount of time to finish this project. I have also been asking questions about the subject field and teaching skills the professor performes in class. She has gave me great advice and I have helped her by giving her ideas that she can use in her class to teach. We make a great team and I am really happy I found her.

The follwing are some questions and anwers to our research:)

1. Do students who have had more math end up with greater gains in the conceptual part of the course?

    - plot raw gains vs. initial level of math
   
    ** Scatter plot does seem to show a correlation between level of preparedness and
                level of conceptual gain.

2. Are the students who have had more math less likely to drop the course?

    - Count how many of all the students have each level of math. Then do this again only
      for students that finished the course. Calculate the percentage of students in each
      category since the final number will be lower.

    **Surprisingly, the percentages of students at each level of math stayed roughly
    constant between the beginning and end of the course, indicating that students
    generally do not drop astronomy due to their initial level of math.

3. Are the students who believe the course will be difficult more likely to drop the course?

    - Count how the levels of difficulty expected by each student. Then do this again only
      for students that finished the course. Calculate the percentage of students in each
      category since the final number will be lower.

    ** Surprisingly, the percentages of students at each level of perceived difficulty
    stayed roughly constant between the beginning and end of the course, indicating t
    hat students generally do not drop astronomy due to their initial expectations.


4. Do students who perceive the course as less difficult end up with greater gains?

    -plot gains vs. perceived difficulty at the beginning of the course vs. gains,
    taking out the students who dropped.

    ** Scatter plot does seem to show a correlation between initial expectations and
                level of conceptual gain.    

5. What is the average normalized gain for all classes? Only 7.5%

6. How do the average normalized gains for all classes from F05/S06 compare to those from S11/F11?  Still to come.