Reflection
There are several things that I enjoyed doing during this project and I'm grateful for the things I learned by doing research. One of those lessons was that not everything goes according to plan, and that's alright. By certain parts of the experiment going wrong, I learned valuable skills that helped me recover and find solutions to my problems that I had not foreseen. As a whole, the EDGE project helped me expand my horizons and figure out a little more about myself. It also gave me valuable experience that I can keep with me and apply in future schoolwork, research, and eventually in my career. As a professional I can apply those skills and lessons learned to better help myself, my workplace, and my patients.
One of the results that I did not expect or want was the downward trend line. This suggests a decrease in critical thinking skills in students, and that's exactly what I wasn't looking for. Although this presented a problem to my original hypothesis, it gave me an opportunity to re-evaluate the way that I prepared and did the research. There were so many factors that could have affected the scores of the students that it's impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of the decreasing scores. I would still like to investigate the subject of critical thinking and mathematics. In fact, I would like to perform similar studies in other classrooms to try and be more thorough in my research. However, I would like help from faculty and other students to figure out better ways to perform the research.
This project began with a small idea that came from a radio talk-show. I didn't think it would turn into a full-on research project that I would come up with and carry out. Perhaps the most difficult part of the project was deciding how to measure critical thinking. Since its such a huge and complex concept, there was no quick way to decide how I would "measure" progression or regression in critical thinking skills. Once I finally decided on an appropriate way to assess critical thinking, creating the surveys was fairly straightforward. I looked in areas where critical thinking is supposedly the center of problems and used those for my surveys. Getting professors to participate in the survey was also fairly easy, but getting the students to participate and come to class every time there was a survey proved to be quite the challenge. Because of absences, I lost much of my sample size. Because of a lack of understanding or seriousness on the part of the students, results probably weren't as accurate as they could have been. This taught me that, when working with people, variables don't work exactly how we expect them to, and that's alright. The most exciting part of the experiment for me was the quantification of data. As discussed in my formal research paper, I was expecting at least an increase in the critical thinking skills of students, but that was not the case. I knew I would probably get unexpected results, but nonetheless, I was satisfied with how my research turned out.