Connecting My Story to Research- Revision

“Mommy, I want to play school. Can I be the teacher?”
Since a child I have known that I wanted to be a teacher. After earning my teaching certificate I taught first and second grade for five years before entering the educational administration field. While working as a teacher I taught and assessed students in various ways in my classroom while always administering the required materials and assessments. Typically, the required assessments were K-2 Running Records and traditional paper and pencil math assessments. The mandatory assessments gave me valuable information as a teacher, but I began to question if there was another way to assess students and gain even more information about student learning while working on my master’s degree in elementary education. It was during this time that I decided to do some research on assessment and discovered a new way to assess: Performance Based Assessment.
I read several articles and books about Performance Based Assessment (PBA) and decided I wanted to try this approach with the group of students that I was teaching. It was also during this time that the state of North Carolina mandated that all schools must use PBAs with several math assessments throughout the school year. It became clear to me that I needed to complete my thesis around PBA with the group of students that I taught during the 2000-2001 school year so that I could be more literate about the topic. Through this experience I learned several reasons why PBA was used in the classroom and some of the drawbacks.
Today, PBA is still a type of assessment that is widely used. I have been reading more on this topic and written two papers over the past year to expand my literature review. Working with an Appalachian State University librarian, I have searched the dissertation abstracts and located a dissertation and thesis on a similar topic that I am considering for my research. I have not read the entire material and need to find time to read each one from cover to cover. After glancing through the materials, I am confident that I can complete a dissertation on this topic and feel like it does not have to be a self-defeating task.
Currently, I feel that I am in a place where I have a decent start for my dissertation literature review, but I need to become more committed to my topic with intense time devoted to reading and searching the literature to see what else I have not discovered. However, time is an issue when it comes to doing extra reading on top of our already demanding workload.
In regards to my dissertation, I would like to expand my thesis and conduct a similar study with a larger group of students in a different school system. I would like to compare a traditional paper and pencil math assessment to a PBA in math that is required on the state math assessments. The math topic I would assess is ordinal numbers, and since this subject is taught in first grade, my subjects would be first grade students.
I still do not have the details ironed out, but I am sure I can nail it down to make it a “doable” dissertation. I have spoken with Cabarrus County Schools Director for Elementary Education, the school system that I want to complete my dissertation research, and he recommends that I focus on one school within the county. He wants to help make the connection between me and the principal in hopes of the principal being supportive of my research. For my thesis I used a convenience sample, which included the twenty students in my classroom. When conducting research for the dissertation, I want to use all students in the first grade at one school. The school that I am currently considering would have about 140 students.
While my topic ideas are still fussy and the school is not officially selected for my research, I know this is the path I want to proceed since I have knowledge of teaching this same content in my personal classroom. After reading today about invention strategies for our class assignment, I know I need to use one of these methods to help sort out my ideas. Choyce Cochran’s drawings on pages 72-74 would help me with my planning. I am now at the point where I need someone with dissertation experience to help me talk it through and create a clear plan. It is my hopes to finalize my dissertation topic and all the details during my advising meetings with Dr. Miller during the course of this semester. If I had the logistics worked out then I could begin giving serious thought to how the research will take place and be at a more comfortable place in my doctoral studies.