Interviews

The participant voice is typically captured in an interview. I plan to use two different types of interviews where the students will be selected based on a given criteria. This type of selection is a form of purposeful sampling.

The first interview will be a task think-aloud. Students will be selected if they fall into the low, middle or high academic group based on performance in the Logo unit. These three students will be representative of  other students in these three groups. Think of this as finding the typical case. There might not be three distinct groups, so this part of my plan can be modified. The selection components are:

• Students will be given a set of three tasks to complete - the first one is a warm up and not the one I am collecting data from.
• Students will be asked to talk about their steps as they work.

These interviews can be recorded if I have permission. As I examine the artifacts produced by these three students, the think-aloud data will be used to support (or refute) what I am finding.

The second type of interview will focus on students that show a marked change (good or bad) in the attitude surveys (one on geometry and one on technology). The goal of this interview is to examine what types of activities or factors prompted the change. The selection criteria has three components.

• The student's survey responses show a pattern of change over the time of the study
• The student represents others in the same "group" 
• The student will talk when asked questions

 Note that all of these interviews will take place following the study, so I need to plan time to meet with six different students (unless I want to use a case study methodology within the AR study where I really zero in on three or four students).

To summarize, the data sources for this study are balanced between the categories of artifact, observation and interview.
Student work:  Pre-test, selected quiz problems, and capstone project
Teacher/Researcher Observations:  Field Journal and Checklists
Student Interviews (student voice):  Task think-aloud and attitude change

As you can see, this study has seven different data sources (not counting the lesson plans). This is the absolute maximum I would recommend for a teacher/researcher. Because my students are pre-service teachers (adults) and are fluent in social media, I created a private Ning Community where they can reply to my prompts or post their own.  I am not sure if I will use this data source, but it seems like it would be nice to have for post-hoc analysis.