Category: Experiential Learning

Learning from experience vs. memorizing

1/5/2020

This is a great article. Click the title of the article to go to The Chronicle of Higher Education to read the article.

No Textbooks, No Lectures, and No Right Answers. Is This What Higher Education Needs?
By Beth McMurtrie FEBRUARY 10, 2019

I use project-based learning methods.
I have my marketing students work with a local company or non-profit organization (their choice). The end product from the course - usually a segment analysis, or a marketing or promotion plan - is not pre-defined. The students have to figure it out.
My students get frustrated. I know, because they write about how they didn't get step-by-step instructions in the end-of-year reviews of my teaching.
The students want detailed, step-by-step instructions. I give them - through lectures, textbook readings, articles, and current new examples - the foundational knowledge that they need to complete their projects. I make myself available to mentor and coach them - to answer any questions they have - every day of the week.
The students have to apply that knowledge to a messy and complicated real-life problem to help a local business owner or non-profit organization manager. That is what they will do after they graduate.
I live with the negative comments in my course reviews because I know they students will benefit in the future.

#highereducation #unca #uncasheville #projectbasedlearning #learningfromexperience #education

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Analyzing Life

7/22/2019

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For my research friends, I'd like to introduce a book that clearly describes the processes involved in analyzing qualitative data. My dissertation chairperson suggested the book: Qualitative research: Analyzing life, Saldaña, J., & Omasta, M. (2017).

As I analyze my research interviews exploring experiential learning at an Asian campus of a large American university, I am finding this new book to be a rich source of guidance. In the past, I have pulled my research method references from several authors, including Saldaña's The coding manual for qualitative researchers, and also including Becoming Qualitative Researchers by Glesne (2011), and Interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences, by Seidman (2013).

The new Saldaña, J., & Omasta, M. (2017) book is designed as a college qualitative research textbook. It is easy to follow and combines the methods that I have studied elsewhere into one book. For my dissertation, I will mostly refer to this text when I describe my analytic methods, if only to simplify the references. This is worth purchasing (or borrowing from the library) if you are doing any sort of qualitative study.

#qualitativeresearch #qualitativedataanalysis #dataanalysis #Saldaña #Omasta #experientiallearning

References
Glesne, C. (2011). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction (5th ed.): Pearson.
Saldaña, J. (2015). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (Third ed.): Sage.
Saldaña, J., & Omasta, M. (2017). Qualitative research: Analyzing life: Sage Publications.
Seidman, I. (2013). Interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences (4th ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.

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Student Linquistic abilities

6/30/2019

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I am analyzing the interview data I collected from students for my PhD dissertation. Many of these students are amazing, especially in their linguistic abilities.

I'll let this excerpt from the transcript of one interview with a female student speak for itself. The student's name below is a pseudonym.

Paul: Okay. Uhm how many languages do you speak?
Mary: Four.
Paul: What are they?
Mary: Portuguese, Japanese, English and Spanish.
Paul: Wow!
Mary: Hmm.
Paul: That’s pretty impressive.
Mary: No, I wish I could be fluent in all of them. English and Spanish are the most challenging.

I should add that the student's English during two long interviews was flawless.

#smartstudents

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Analyzing qualitative data - excel & word (QDA)

6/2/2019

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I have struggled to find the best way to compile and structure my interview data for analysis. The analytic methods will follow the direction provided by Saldaña (2015, pp. 14-15). These methods will include transcription of the recorded interviews, coding the transcribed data, categorizing the data, and developing themes and concepts. See Figure 3 below from Saldaña (2015, p. 14) for a graphic illustration of the process. The written report on the data will follow the recommendations of Saldaña (2015) and Seidman (2013). See the first figure below. This shows the process of developing categories and themes following coding of the interview data.

The challenge is in the process of finding an efficient method to analyze as many as 38 interviews, comprising first and second interviews from 19 participants. For researchers with similar challenges, I am sharing an article by Solveig Ose (2016) that provides a process to convert the MS Word transcripts of the interviews into tables in Excel for coding and analysis. See the second figure below. This is an illustration of the data copied from Word to Excel. This is part of the qualitative data analysis (QDA) process.

Figure 1. A model for moving from data through codes to themes and theories (Saldaña, 2015, p. 14).

Figure 2. Example of transcribed text in Excel (Ose, 2016, p. 5).

Ose, S. O. (2016). Using Excel and Word to Structure Qualitative Data. Journal of Applied Social Science, 10(2), 147–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/1936724416664948

Saldaña, J. (2015). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (Third ed.): Sage.

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Analyzing qualitative data - excel & word (QDA)

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