Blog #8: Challenges, Issues, Concerns, Successes

After I presented my lit review to the class last week, I felt a bit worried that I didn't explicitly frame my topic as a study of "information seeking behaviors," and I started to panic that maybe it wasn't.  But, the more I think about it, that's exactly what it is.   I am trying to determine, in my pilot study, what individual and institutional factors influence teachers at my school to work with the school library media specialist.  The "information" in this case would be the media specialist's knowledge of resources, information literacy skills, technology tools, etc.  The "seeking" aspect of this study would be whether/to what extent/why teachers seek out or agree to collaboration with the the SLMS as they design, deliver, and assess lessons.  As I revise my lit review, I am working on incorporating this more explicitly into an introduction to the topic.

I also have been working on my survey this week and have a draft of the questions I will ask.  I am planning to do a combination of open ended and multiple choice questions.  So far, I have about 15.  I think this is a good number, but I am still working on refining them.  Although I feel good about my progress with the questions, I haven't started to input them into a Google Form.  This will be the first time I've created one (besides a few practice exercises in my tech and learning course), so I am a bit concerned about how that will go.  All in all, though, I feel pretty good about my pilot study design.  I think I will wait to actually send out the survey until after class next week.  Of course, I have concerns about the next steps: mostly, how many of the 46 will actually complete my survey and will I be able to effectively analyze and see patterns in the data?  But, one step at a time!