 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama Spinoza and this is a video on your final project. This is pulling together all those different pieces of research to present something that looks like a complete project. And the big idea, her main message is that your final project is really more than just the sum of all of those different parts that you've been pulling together. We'll look at this through those different parts, understanding that checklist of information that needs to be included in the project, as well as look at some stylistic kinds of decisions that you might make and the ways that you can present your projects. So big takeaway from this video, hopefully, is that you realize that all of those pieces you've been pulling together since the beginning, you've done deep dives into understanding how to formulate good research questions, how to find literature, how to then apply this within an action research project within your classroom, how do you analyze this and how do you come up with conclusions. That's terrific, but the bigger idea is how when you present this as a project, how it looks much more complete as a whole as opposed to all of those loose parts altogether. And we want you, just global overview, to make sure that you're considering that as part of whatever presentation format you choose, that you're indicating what the problem is, you're telling us what previous research exists, what has already been done in the field, what did you do as far as an intervention was concerned, and what did you find as a result of that. And then probably the most interesting aspect of this is, now that you know this, where does this now point you? What are the new questions that you might have? So let's look at these pieces individually. At the beginning, remember we asked you, you know, what do you want to know? What are the problems out there that you want to resolve? Or what is it that you want to learn that would make you a better teacher? So that needs to be stated up front. And you'll recall, when we did this a couple of modules back, we asked you to start just by asking yourself, what do you want to know? And it's also very healthy to sort of, you know, remind yourself of that main guiding question throughout, you know, what is it that I really want to know? And if you can do that, you've got a north and you will continue to have something very consistent in the presentation of your project. We also shared with you some characteristics of great research questions, so how are they structured so that you can come up with the very best and most precise question possible. We asked you to do this in a couple of steps, right? After you've figured out that problem and you know this global topic that it fits under and you ask yourself, what do you want to know about that particular topic, then can you structure this in this very particular format of a research question format? And we had to do this in this format, how and to what extent does something, you know, influence or change or improve something else or modify something else, just to isolate two variables. So how does one thing influence another thing? How does extensive and precise written feedback help change a person's self-perception as a writer? How and to what extent does the influence of creative writing improve academic writing? How and to what extent does the use of how and why questions enhance critical thinking? Or how and to what extent can self-regulation skills be improved by, you know, X intervention in the class? So by structuring it in this way, you're able to then see the impact of one thing on another, which is really hard to do in classroom settings because there's all kinds of other variables that are always influential here. So what we're asking to do is isolating it in this way. You're able to make even very complex problems more refined. So how and to what extent does using up a scalable intervention from the physical to the psychological to the neurological improve diagnosis of whether or not a kid really has a reading problem or not, right? So we take the very complicated questions within education and we make them a bit more manageable by using this particular format. The second thing you have to include in your presentation of your project is to let us know what's already been done. And it seems that we spend a lot of time and a lot of people became very wary about their own topics or their areas of interest at this point, because they realize a lot has already been done in many of these different fields, you know, motivation and students or how does a teacher's home life affect their professional interactions with others, right? There's a lot of research on all of these different topics. The main idea of this particular section is to show you're not re-raking all the ground, you know what's been said out there. But what you're trying to do is build bigger and better things on the shoulder of those previous giants of scholars, right? So know what the literature is in the field that you're going to be researching. And we reminded you of this when we talked about how to do a literature of you, right? You know, once you've defined that subject and then you can go to different types of databases to look for information and to look for recommendations and to find out who the thought leaders really are in different areas of the field and maybe even follow up directly with some of them. We also talked about how you structure a formal literature review. Many of you are doing formal projects. Some of you are not doing such formal projects. But if you were to do this for a publication, for example, in the literature review, you have to explain the objective, the genres of writing, the general overview of all the things that are there and how you categorize the research that you actually found. So this is a very structured way to do it. But if you've done anything even near this, you've definitely completed the project because doing a formal literature review is quite complex, mainly because it can serve multiple purposes. Which is why we sort of have this fun quiz here, you know, is the literature review part of a dissertation or a thesis? Or could it be that research itself could a whole study just be on what does the literature say about something? Or can it be a methodology? You know, systematic literature review is a type of methodology. Or is it used to establish what's already known about a topic? The answer is that it's all of those things, which is why the literature review is really very challenging for a lot of people because you spend a lot of time fishing yourself out of the rabbit holes that you create because something seems interesting and go down one path or another. But it is an important thing to share in your final project that you let everybody know that you know what already exists about this and that you are going to use that information to scaffold your own new knowledge about the topic. Then we want you to be sure you include your general methodology. You know, what did you do? How did you approach this? For example, a systematic literature review of everything that there is to know about evaluation from the micro level student to teacher level, to the classroom level, to the school level, to the district level, to the state level, to an international level, and did you do a systematic literature review? Or did you have an intervention? Did you actually work with kids on a different type of strategy? Or did you use a rubric of comparison of observable behavior in order to determine root causes of learning problems? Lots of things you could do as interventions. But basically, in this part of the project, you're explaining the methodological approach you took to the action research. And when we talked about methodology and we talked about action research, we explained how there's a lot of information about choosing what is the right methodology for approaching research and education. All of these things are very good to have as a global overview of how research can and should be conducted in its most formal sense. But what's really important about action research is understanding its unique approach, is it's really fluid nature. It's very dynamic. Many of you found that in the course of applying an intervention or doing something slightly different, you realized you had to adjust other things. And that might not have been anticipated as part of your initial research question. That's OK. That's the whole and really fascinating and really cool part about action research is that you're meant to sort of adjust your interventions as you go based on the new information you have from your students. So if you found that something was working and it was working so great, you decided to double the number of times you were going to be doing it, that's fine. Or if you find that something was beginning to do harm and alienating some kids, well, then you stop it, right? The big idea with action research, though, is that you document all of those different processes and decisions. And we know globally there's just such great benefits to doing action research for the individual as well as for the institution where that person works. And so this is why we encourage teachers throughout your whole craziness of the day. On top of all of this, it's great if you can do reaction research and document the things that we do, because it really does make a big difference in the quality of the whole institution. And finally, a last big idea about action research is that it's continual. It's cyclical. Every single time you finally answer one of those research questions or resolve one of those problems, then new questions and new problems emerge. And that's the natural process of doing action research. And that's why it's a never ending battle within schools is that we're always continually perfecting our interventions as teachers. Then when you get to this analysis stage, we're explaining why something happened. You're explaining to others what you actually found. After you did that intervention, after you did something in the classroom setting, after you compared that literature, what do you think you found? And not only what you found, that's reporting, but why you think those things came together in the way they did. To do analysis, we reminded you a couple of weeks back that it's really important to look at this level of analysis as being far more than just reporting information at the level of understanding or applying it in an example setting, but actually getting to the level of analyzing the information and being able to synthesize multiple analysis so that you can make a judgment call and decide if this was a good thing or a bad thing and maybe even be able to create a totally new idea after that. And we talked a little bit about analysis in the context of critical thinking and its role there and making sure that you weren't just reporting information, but that you were actually getting to that level of analysis when you do share your project with others. And then when you finally get to the conclusions within your project, you're explaining, okay, now that I know all this new information, what do I do now? So in the conclusions, you talk about the things you expected to find and the things you didn't expect to find and how that now creates new problems or new questions for you. So vital element. Remember, in your conclusions, number one thing you have to do is answer the research question that you have laid out for yourself. You report those expected findings. You report the unexpected findings. You have a great discussion about what all of those things mean together. You explain how, you know, your study had limitations. If I were to do it all over again, I might have changed X or Y or done this earlier or done this later or done this with more kids or less kids. But you explain the limitations of what happened and then you recommend what you would hope people would do in the future with the information that you're providing. So that's it. Basically, in the next module, we'll talk about different ways and formats that you could present your findings. But that in sum is what we hope your overall project looks like. Please come with a lot of questions to the next class looking forward to seeing you soon.