Presentation Reflection

Today, I completed the presentation component to the colleagues I worked with at the after-school program.  I presented my PowerPoint presentation, giving a summary of how the research question came about, what the literature review "story" was, what the question was, my plan for gathering and analyzing the data, my findings, the limitations and questions raised after my analysis was complete, and the conclusion and implications - strengths of the program and ways in which it could improve to reach the ESL students even more.  Overall, everyone was happy with the findings and did not really have much to comment and not really any changes to suggest.  The coordinator only mentioned that there were two "improvements" I mentioned that the program actually does do or were trying to fulfill.  I need to see if I need to change any of this in my presentation after consulting with my professor.  Other than that, I think my presentation and the final paper are ready to be submitted!

Research Update

Since my last post, I collected data two more times: once from observations of the final program session and the second, from one more interview.  The final observation wasn't very helpful because most of the students spent the time socializing, since they didn't really have homework to work on (with testing, end-of-the-school year, etc).  There were also less students because of a middle-school band concert going on that evening, as well as a youth group starting up their gatherings again.  The interview was with the English teacher of one of the interviewed students.  We had a productive, interesting conversation.

Throughout the data collection process, I had slowly begun to organize the data, especially the interviews.  I broke up the transcriptions of the conversations into categories, and those categories into other categories, grouped and regrouped, new categories formed, old ones were erased, etc.  It was an ongoing process of viewing how all the pieces worked together to answer the question.  When all my data collection was complete, I repeated this grouping/regrouping process multiple times until I was more or less satisfied with the resulting themes.  Then I began to write up the lists into my actual paper.  As I wrote, I still continued to organize and reorganize as I saw that some pieces fit better somewhere else.

I finally finished the paper and am waiting for feedback from the professor so that I can make final changes and submit it.  I will present my findings to the after-school program committee this Wednesday, if all goes well.