Initial Data Collection Complete!

Yesterday I drew a line under the initial phase of the data collection when I closed the online questionnaires to further responses.

To summarise the target students for this research:

705 students are registered to study the year 1 course in 2008, and thus were invited to complete the Pre-Course questionnaire. 567 responses were returned to the questionnaire which yielded 506 usable sets of data once duplicates were removed. As a principle the latest version of the questionnaire has been included unless this was a blank response, in which case the next earliest that included answers was taken. Overall this equates to a 72% response rate to the Pre-Course Questionnaire.

470 students are registered to take the Information Management and Control module which the initial phase has focused on. Of these 74 students were retaking the module after failing or deferring it in a previous year. 381 students submitted a copy of the diary that they kept for week 2 of the module, of which 363 were usable for research purposes. This equates to a response rate of 77% for the diary.

In respect of the module assessment 447 students submitted their first assignment and 438 submitted assignment 2, a submission rate of 95% and 93% respectively. In terms of module outcome this results in 430 students passing the module - a pass rate of 91%.

348 students submitted a response to the Post-Module questionnaire. After duplicates were removed (following the same criteria as for the Pre-Course questionnaire) this yielded 310 usable responses - a response rate of 66%.

When these various sets of data are combined, the result is a total of 221 complete sets of data that include responses to the two questionnaires, submission of the diary as well as details of student's assessment marks and their participation in the VLE forums. This equates to 47% of the module population, however, as only 2 students retaking the module submitted a complete set of data this is effectively 55% of new students taking the module.

In respect of profile of the full sets collected, 56% are from male students (compared with 65% across all students taking the module), which would appear to be representative. What appears less representative is that 99% of the students submitting complete sets of data are passing the module whereas only 1% (2 students) have failed it. This does suggest that a proportion of students (up to 45) may already have dropped out or deferred before the module ended. What is not clear is the extent that time may have caused, or contributed, to this.

The next phase is to analyse the data. All 221 sets of data are now printed and a visual examination will be the first step. This should reveal those factors which seem to contribute to time pressures, and so will be extracted into SPSS for more detailed analysis.

Never a dull day!!

Data Collected?

Maybe this scenario is familiar to you. You have a period of free time coming up and you plan to get a lot of work / research / writing done - then life intervenes!! This was the story of my Easter break. I had some leave to use up before the end of March so booked to take the week off after Easter. My plan was to sort out the data and get it into a form ready for SPSS. All went well until Easter Sunday and then the dreaded 'flu virus struck and that was me finished for a whole week! It is a long time since I've been so badly affected to the point that I have not even wanted to switch the computer on!!

So now I am trying to catch up with my schedule. In reality I am still collecting data from the students. Despite reminders there are still a number who have not sent me their diary, however, I reckon this reflects the accuracy (or lack of it) so I am no longer pushing for these. Actually I have done pretty well and have 358 diaries to work with.

I am still pressing students to complete the post-module questionnaire as the response has not been as good as I had hoped for. 327 have so far completed it which is not bad but leaves quite a few incomplete sets of data (pre-course questionnaire, diary, post-course questionnaire) which if I can get a further 80 or so to submit will be good.

I have now finished analysing the module forums which give me actual details of messages posted and replied to, and at what time on which day these were made. Combined with the Blackboard stats, this not only allows me to compare the actual access and activity against the diaries but will also give me a picture of whether a student was posting to the study schedule and, if not, how far behind they may have got.

The last set of data that I have yet to complete is the assignment mark data. This is now waiting for one or two slow tutors to return their assignment 2 results. Once in I should be in a position to start printing out sets of results per student. As of today I have around 190 sets of complete data but with luck (and the cooperation of the students) I am hoping to get this up to around 240 students ie half the students taking the module.

The last three months have been very pressurised in terms of data collection. I am now looking forward to a period of analysis and drawing interim conclusions from the data.