Undergraduate Research
Through the Honors in the Major program, I completed an undergraduate thesis, titled "Addressing Student Engagement through Meaning-Making: Reception Theories and the Narrative Paradigm".
Writing my Prospectus
Prospectus cover page, Google Doc
Writing...
Getting to choose my own niche topic and leading a year-long project about it? For academic credit as well? Research is fun. I didn't know that about myself until now.
However, not having any sense of direction was less fun. I knew I wanted to focus on instructional design, but had no template of what a prospectus or thesis should look like.
I eventually got the hang of it, looking through guides online and discussing with my supervisor (who I scrounged for student examples). At the end of the day, I landed on 18 pages of solid content that covered all a prospectus should cover.
My Prospectus
Student engagement is a heavily debated topic, being essential to the learning process and one's future yet perceived to be decreasing. The high reports of learning apathy must be addressed, with many means of disengagement involving a lack of overall purpose or meaning in their coursework.
In my research, I aim to explore different meaning-making theories, namely Ausubel's meaningful learning theory, reader-response criticism, and the narrative paradigm theory, to evaluate their potential effectiveness when implemented in classrooms.
Conducting Interviews
After going through the wringer that is IRB, I began searching out participants for my interview. I cold emailed a couple professors, but those who reached back were mainly those I had connections to previously. I'll withhold information on said connections for privacy reasons, but I'd like to shout out Lucas von Hollen who likes appearing in random students' works to show he interacts with us. Besides him, it was fun letting people choose their own pseudonyms.
In the end, I conducted 10 interviews over the course of November - 5 with students and 5 with instructors. With that, I internalized the oft-forgotten truth that everyone learns differently. Excitingly, all interviewees spoke positively about using narratives and storytelling in learning. I transcribed the audio recordings using Vibe and plugged everything into Taguette (for thematic analysis purposes).
Then, I began taking on the beast that is the actual thesis.
Interview documents
Highlighted transcript, Taguette
Defending my Thesis
Thesis Defense - Presentation
I exaggerated. After organizing my data and finding some discipline, the thesis pretty much wrote itself. I used the prospectus as a base and synthesized the results/discussion over Thanksgiving break, the rest being refined with thanks to my supervisor, Michael Neal.
Because of that, I decided to defend earlier than we thought, February 24th becoming both a looming figure and a relief. When the day came, it turns out that the defense itself was much more a dialogue...a dialogue I had spent a year preparing for.
I passed!
After a couple revisions of my draft (and a lot of paperwork), the final version was finally submitted.
DOI URL: https://doi.org/10.33009/FSU_e36b8a55-01c9-4bc3-8854-35b253fd4e8d
Notes made by Neal during Defense