Research Journal Assignment #13a: Field Research

I conducted a two part study for my field research. The first part was a simple survey of some educators that I know. The second part was an interview with my uncle, Bob Elliott, who has been a teacher for over 20 years.

The questions asked in my survey were:

1. What age are you teaching?
2. What ages have you taught?
3. In your classroom are you more likely to allow your students to make their own investigations or do you prefer to provide guided instruction?
4. Do you think that development in children is culture specific?

The answers I received from my survey were:

1. Varying ranges but mostly sixth grade and under
2. Again it varied but fell closer to the younger side of schooling
3. Out of everyone I surveyed only one person said they are more likely to allow their students to make their own investigations while the rest concluded that children need lots of modeling and guidance, especially when they are younger.
4. Every educator I surveyed concluded that development in children is in fact culture specific.

As stated, I interviewed Bob Elliot, who has been an educator in the state of Hawaii for over 20 years and has taught K-12 and graduate level courses in his teaching career, with a good portion spent in grades five and six. I asked him similar questions to what I had asked in the survey but in more depth and he provided a lot of good information. Just to sample a couple of answers he wrote this:

"At the elementary level all activities are instructor driven with specific responses required but accommodations allowed based on different learning styles."

"Most significant to note here is that students are individuals. Birth order in the family, medical conditions, relationships with siblings and parents, number of parents in the house, climate, and socio-economic status all contribute to a student's readiness to learn. Even within the same culture, some children absorb knowledge independently while others require repetition, longer learning periods, and varied examples before the same content begins to penetrate the student's organizational thought patterns that lead to an assimilation of base knowledge that builds a base of knowledge for higher level content learning."

I will utilize both the survey and the more in depth interview to further my argument in the paper.