The additional data came from videotaped sessions that were transcribed and analyzed and the Likert survey, which was administered to the students. Teachers now make careful considerations when grouping students to create project teams, keeping in mind strengths, weaknesses, temperament, and independent working skills. We also asked teachers to address keyboarding skills in the primary grades, because our findings indicated that many students struggled when typing information into text boxes. The difficulty many students faced when researching information was another concern identified during our research. Students told us during interview sessions that they needed more time to complete their projects.
Teachers now allot more independent work time at computer stations in the classroom.
We hope this will help students be more creative with their projects in ways such as providing more details to text information as well as creating their own designs for the stacks rather than just incorporating images from the Internet and graphic libraries. In addition, students said they liked to use rubrics because they helped them better understand what was expected in terms of stack design and content. Our teachers are developing and using new rubrics to assess the quality and content of the presentations as well as students' independent working skills. They use traditional educational research methods such as standardized testing, surveys, and other quantitative methodologies. Teacher-researchers' work often helps explain why something occurred, because it provides interpretive research through its qualitative approach.