Sunday, June 27, 2010

Getting behind on the posts

Sorry everyone, I'm starting to get lax on the posting. Not much of interest has happened. At least I don't think so. We spent the week preparing for Friday since we had a parents meeting to gather consent and a meeting with all of the mentors on Friday. When we went to the school, we were really surprised that when we walked up and they had decorated the school with streamers and fresh flowers. The meeting with the parents itself went really well and the response from the parents was extremely positive overall. Many of them also volunteered for interviews. I'm not sure how we are going to squeeze it all in.

At the mentors meeting, we asked the mentors to pilot a survey for us. I'm not sure how it's going to go, but it's one of those things that has to be addressed. Currently the foundation doesn't really track how much knowledge the children are acquiring over time, so of course to demonstrate whether or not the children are learning, a simple survey is necessary to test their knowledge. It should be really simple, but we didn't get a lot of encouragement on it from the administration, and in my mind I'm thinking "Hmmmmm, I wonder why that is."

Meagan is really spear heading the whole survey which is exciting. Now that we have spent a significant amount of time her, she is really taking charge of the different parts of the project that she enjoys. It's nice to have an equal partner in this thing again to take some of the burden off of my shoulders.

That's sort of a tangent, but anyway, when she was explaining how to administer the survey, all I could think of was an image of a dandelion and us blowing on the seeds to watch them float away. All we can do is hope that it works, and if it doesn't, adjust it until it does. It's amazing how much we make this up as we go along, and it's not that we aren't prepared or that the outcomes aren't quality outcomes, I"m just proud of us for being flexible enough to finesse quality outcomes out of some seriously precarious situations. Such is the nature of research, and we're getting really good at it. Cheers!

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