As some of you know, I received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the impacts of the XO laptops in B'ham City Schools. The School Board decided to begin with one elementary school this spring and then decide if they wanted to accept the other laptops. I found some additional funding to allow us to collect data at the pilot school. My team rushed to get pretest data from students at this pilot school before the laptops were distributed and we'll go back in the fall to do our posttest surveying. We planned to present our research findings to the School Board, hoping that it would help them make a decision on whether to accept the other laptops. It appears they've already made their decision -- without seeing any data from us at least.
The School Board voted yesterday to accept the remaining 14,000 XOs; they'll distribute them beginning in September. This is good news as my NSF grant is to study middle school students; so this fall we'll be really busy collecting pretest survey data on 2500 middle school students and then following up with them in the spring. We'll also be doing interviews with a small number of students and surveying teachers.
Here's to a busy fall semester collecting lots of data!
15 years ago
1 comment:
double wowsville! I'm working my butt off to get my 3rd one. A donation. I can't wait to learn about what you've learned... hope we'll have time to play in Copenhagen. j
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