Data-Based Decision Making:

Course
ED 690

Project Description
For this project, I wrote a research paper on the use of video instruction to bring about attitudinal and behavioral changes in subjects. Specifically, I wanted to research the use of a “gas saving tips” video to bring about attitudinal and behavioral changes to the participants’ driving habits. The project involved conducting an extensive literature review on the use to instructional video to bring about these changes, as well as the history of video as a form of instruction.

EDTEC Standard
This artifact demonstrates my competence at taking a valid research issue and deciding how to conduct the best possible investigation into my hypothesis. I began with a thorough review of extant literature to help me contextualize my hypothesis. Once I had the background scaffolding constructed, I “built” my paper, making the following decisions along the way:

I decided that the best way to explore my research question was to conduct a pretest/post test research design model, with an intervention (in this case, the instructional video) presented between tests.
The decision was made to conduct a non-random sampling of EDTEC students of the summer 2008 session to get the sample population I needed to test my hypothesis.
For data collection, I used surveymonkey.com to create my instruments to administer to my sample population during the pretest and post test portions of the project. Along with creating the surveys, I took steps to ensure that the members in the sample population would remain confidential with regards to their responses. To accomplish this, I created a question in the pretest and post test survey that asked only for the last four digits of their student ID numbers, so that I would be able to match both surveys to the same person.
In order to analyze the data that I collected, I conducted a thorough analysis on both the raw data from the surveys as well as a paired T-test on the members of the population that I could match both the pretest and post test surveys to.

The data that I analyzed suggested that the use of an instructional video does bring about some attitudinal and behavioral changes associated with driving habits.

Problems or Opportunities
The major problem with this project was my inexperience in conducting true research. Also, I was brand new to the program, and at the time really had no background or experience to draw from. Another problem that I faced was the relatively quick timeframe of the summer session. During the short “semester”, I thought of a research project, conducted a thorough literature review, created the instruments (surveys) for my study, administered them and collected/analyzed the data, and finally wrote the study.

My Capabilities
This project built on my confidence of coming back to college after ten years to obtain an advanced degree. The more I worked on this project, the more comfortable I became with the notion of being back in school. Also, I quickly became capable of conducting research in the library to gather relevant information, articles, and studies to help me produce my project.

Lessons Learned
This project was a great learning experience for me. I would have to consider this the first actual “research” paper that I had ever written. My prior undergraduate papers, including my thesis, did not compare to the amount of work that I put into this project. I also learned how to properly go through all of the steps of the research process to produce a high quality product.
Another thing I gained from this class was a better understanding on how to use a few different software products, most notably Microsoft Word and the statistical package SPSS. Dr. Marcie Bober-Michel taught us many things about these programs previously unknown by a majority of the students. Her knowledge and assistance made writing the paper a lot easier than it would have been trying to figure it out on my own.