Week 8, Assignment 2

8 weeks came and went so quick!!! I understand why my Brandman Coach expressed the importance of this class. Since we started, I have used in my psychology class what I have learned in this one.

The literature review was the hardest assignment of all, what really helped was the video tutorial that was posted. The explanation was so clear and easy to understand. After finishing all the textbook chapters for this week, the video was the cherry on the cake. I still struggled somewhat, but then who said research would be easy. For me, the most difficult part of a paper is the beginning, once the introduction is written I feel that the rest of the paper just seems to flow. Literature review has such great importance for my major, being a psychology major I will have many of papers to write and research to perform.
My experience in this class was absolutely wonderful, so much important information relevant to my career. I will take away from this experience the purpose of research, the importance of citing and giving credit to others work and negative that plagiarism can bring.

Happy holidays to everyone! And thank you to our instructor Mrs. Chase for the feedback on our assignments and the lectures.

Maria Feagin

Week 7, assignment 2

This week assignment wasn't easy, but it wasn't hard either. I reviewed all of my previous weeks to see if any of the sources previously used were relevant to my research question. I was able to find 2 of my previous resources that were relevant, which both were found by using the Leatherby Library. For my other 4 I begin by using the Leatherby Library, I was having trouble finding articles or journals that would answer my research question ("What is causing more parents to choose homeschool over face-to-face classrooms?). I was able to find 2 more peer-reviewed articles, for my other two I tried using the open access websites to research my questions. Since I was not having luck and my results were repetitive I ended up turning to Google and was able to find two more websites with articles regarding my question.

What I found in the majority of my sources is that the information as to why so many parents are turning to homeschool is very repetitive, most of them if not all share the same information. For most, the fact of religious views, race, bullying were the number one factors why parents homeschool their children. I did find two other articles that helped satisfy my need to know why parents are turning to this option, which stated that parents just simply want to have control over their children's learning environment, their study curriculum, and because homeschool just gives them flexibility.

Research Question

What is causing more parents to choose Homeschool over face-to-face classrooms?

Benefits of home education. (n.d.). Retrieved December 15, 2014, from http://www.sheknows.com/parenting/articles/829847/why-are-so-many-parents-choosing-to-homeschool

In this article the author explains how homeschool in the past was a choice of the fringe groups such as church going families or hippies. But, homeschool in the U.S. has increasingly become more popular and is becoming the biggest choice for parents when it comes to their children’s education. Over 2 million families in American homeschool their children and it grows as much as 8% each year. In this article we learn other reasons parents homeschool their children, such as the flexibility that it gives families and the diverse education options they have. Parents can tailor the education needs of their children.

ENGLISH, R. (2015). Use your freedom of choice: Reasons for choosing homeschool in Australia. Journal of Unschooling & Alternative Learning, 9(17), 1.

This article talks about the growing trend of parents choosing to homeschool their children in other countries such as Australia. Like the U.S., Australia and the U.K. and adopted this growing trend. This article talks about the stereotype of parents who homeschool their kids as “social 'misfits': either 'tree-hugging hippies', religious fanatics or 'hothousing' parents determined that their offspring should achieve academic excellence at an early age” (English, p. 3).  The article discusses that in Australia,  the parent’s choice to home educate their children is mostly philosophical. The study “argue that the reasons people home educate include religious belief; parental responsibility; concerns over quality of teaching, especially around literacy and numeracy; social development; avoidance of bullying and other negative peer experiences; distance and special needs” (English, p. 4).

Ice, C. L., & Hoover-Dempsey, K. V. (2011). Linking parental motivations for involvement and student proximal achievement outcomes in homeschooling and public schooling settings. Education and Urban Society, 43(3), 339-369.

This article discusses the motivation of parents to homeschool their children because the strong desire of parental involvement, and to have an active role in their child’s learning process. Parents want to take on the role of construction and effectiveness in helping their children learn. Parents have different motivators for their involvement in their children’s education such as their achievement outcomes. A study performed found that some students that were homeschooled averaged better than those who were educated in a public school.

Martin, Margaret. "Homeschooling: Parents' Reactions." (1997): ERIC. Web. 7 Dec. 2014.

This journal discusses a survey performed on 12 parents that homeschool their children located in the Bronx and Manhattan in New York. The study states that “A growing number of people are very dissatisfied with the public school system and are looking for alternatives to public education” (Martin, p. 2). The study was performed over a 5 year period; in which parents pointed out that religion is one of the biggest reasons why they chose to homeschool their children. Other reason mentioned was trust, and amongst other reasons the journal states that “Other reasons include safety issues, such as overcrowding and drugs in the public schools, parents who want to discipline their children as they chose, and to avoid negative per pressure” (Martin, p. 3).

Probing Question: Why do some people choose to homeschool their kids? | Penn State University. (n.d.). Retrieved December 15, 2014, from http://news.psu.edu/story/141246/2005/10/17/research/probing-question-why-do-some-people-choose-homeschool-their-kids

This article written by Melissa Beattie-Moss from Penn State, say that parents that homeschool their children due to religious views was due to their Christian fundamentals. These parents want more control of their children’s education and their social life. Parents that homeschool feel that public schools have a “one size fits all” approach to education. Homeschool allows parents to tailor their children’s educational needs, interests and abilities. “The teaching methods and materials parents choose are equally diverse, from the most classical education, emphasizing Latin, grammar and rhetoric, to the least structured "unschooling" approach, often defined as "using the whole world as your classroom” (Proving question, n.d.).

Ronsisvalle, T., & Watkins, R. (2005). STUDENT SUCCESS IN ONLINE K-12 EDUCATION. (Undetermined). Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 6(2), 117-184.

This article discusses the advantages that home school or online education has for parents and why a parent would choose to go this way. For example; a child that might have an illness that causes him/her to miss school often and put him/her at risk of dropping out, an online education would be a good solution for this child and parents. Student motivation is definitely one of the tools for success in online education.

Week 6

I thought this week was going to be easy since we had to review and learn about plagiarism. I will get out of that way first what I found a challenge in. My challenge was our first assignment, finding research for our research question. Since my original topic is advantages and disadvantages of online education K-12, my question was "why are parents choosing home-school/online education over a face-to-face education?". Using the open access journal search was not easy, it took me a long time and a lot of breaks from frustration. I finally changed completely the keywords that I was using and found an article using Google Scholarly.
As for plagiarism, this is a topic that has always made me nervous since I started attending college and learned about it. I have always tried to be careful not to fall into it, but unfortunately unknowingly I did, and my instructor talked to me about it and found out that I didn't do it on purpose or even knew about it. I had expressed an opinion that sounded as one of another, but the case was that my paper was written and turned in before another student and since it was an online class we never met or exchanged notes; it happened by coincidence. But ever since I cite everything, even the smallest quotation. I even try not to paraphrase! I feel that plagiarism is critical topic, especially because I don't feel it to be proper or fair for someone to steal others work when that other person so much time in effort in it.

Week 5, Assignment 2

Hope everyone had a safe, delicious and Happy Thanksgiving. For this week, at first when I saw the title of our assignment I felt intimidated. Empirical research! What's that?? The hardest part to be honest was all the reading, seems like every week we have more and more reading. But once it comes down to do the assignment, the reading pays off. I found the Empirical research method to be very helpful, I was able to narrow my research quite a bite, considering the normal results I get is usually in the thousands. Empirical helped narrow my topic of  "Online K-12 education" down to 1 page with 3 articles. It wasn't an easy task at first, but I feel as if I;m getting better at it. I really liked having the Subject-Specific Databases guide, that helped me narrow down my search better. I prefer to use the Leatherby Library because I find that it has the filters I need and it allows me to refine my research by specific subjects, which is what I used this time around. I chose online education, elementary education subjects to be more specific.

Overall, I feel that this class is getting easier and it has facilitated me with other classes. I have learned terms I have never heard of before and how to do better research in ways I never thought I could.

Week 4

As the weeks go by and we cover more information on how to perform research, it begins to get easier to find the proper and reliable resources. This week's assignments taught me a different way to perform my research and how to know if it's a scholarly article or journal. I also learned what to look for that will help in determining it's reliability such as the References that were used and the ISSN. I had learned in the past to look for Resources listed in the articles or Journals, but never the ISSN.

Finding my article was a challenge as it has been in the previous weeks, which I expected since performing research will always be a challenge because we have to read and compare different findings in order to pinpoint the one that we find to be the best fit for our assignment. I do expect a challenge to always be there. 

Since my research has been about the advantages and disadvantages on online/distance education K-12, and n the past couple of week I have been doing my research on the advantages of online education; this week helped me find from students and teachers point of views. My article covered the dropout rates and reasons of online high school courses, along with other topics such as Motivation, Educational Technology, and the Online Educators. These topics cover scheduling and time constraints, academic rigor and motivation, technology problems, problems with online medium and lack of teacher immediacy, and parental influences. 

This week is has helped me compare and contrast my topic of online education. I think that it has given me a deeper knowledge on how to perform my research and find scholarly resources that talk specifically about the downfall of online education.

Recording the steps that I take when I perform my research has gotten easier and really helps me keep track of my process of how I got there, and I can go back and review it if I forgot a step on how I found my article or journal. 

Week 3, Research Strategies

Hi y'all! Well, here we are on week 3 of our assignment of learning how to do research for reliable sources to use on our papers. As I have already taken a class before that taught me how to do research, it has made this class a little easier. What has really starting to work best for me is our textbook "Research Strategies". I have found a lot of information in there that I wasn't aware of when searching for stuff online, such as using parenthesis, and/or, and about keywords and databases.
Also, I have never heard of the CRAAP method. During this assignment (which took me a little longer), I used different ways of searching my topic of Online Education K-12, and I skimmed through many books, and at times got really frustrated and had to walk away and take a break. So much information, thousands of books, journals, articles, etc...

I did all of my research using Leatherby Library, this is my favorite way of researching topics because you have the option of using filters to narrow down your searches, as opposed to using Google. I started by logged into my Library account and the first thing I did before starting my topic search was to set my filter for "e-books" only. This helped narrow my search down in a big way, I went from thousands to hundreds. I searched for my topic using different keywords, I initially started by searching "homeschool K-12". Skimmed through a few books and found nothing that really contained the information I wanted to know about homeschooling through the use of technology. I changed my keywords to "distance education k-12", skimmed through a few books, got frustrated some more, took a couple of days break before going back to my search. I decided to use what I learned from our textbooks and used and/or in my searches, so I searched "homeschool and/or distance education k-12", the books that I found were really the same from when I searched for those topics separately.

I to rethink a better way for searching for homeschool K-12 that involved children using computer exclusively, rather than textbooks and activity books. After some head scratching I thought to search for "online education K-12". I found a few books that sounded interesting but didn't really satisfied my need for information. Until, I found  What Works in K-12 Online Learning by Blomeyer, R. L., & Cavanaugh, C., what I really liked about the book is that it started by giving the reader the fundamentals and principals for a successful online learning experience. This book was written with the views of educators and students that shared their experiences and what worked best for them. It also covered different school subjects and how to be successful in them such as math and social science (it even included Physical Education).

What made me end up sticking with this book what to verify that it met the CRAAP criteria, this was a little challenging for me because I had to go back to my CRAAP sheet and back to the books and look for certain information that would make me feel comfortable knowing that this book was appropriate for my research and reliable.

I hope that my experiences can help others who might at time, like myself, struggle doing research. Researching for reliable resources is very challenging and I have personally learned, that you don't stop learning. Even though the book I found was K-12, I felt that this could apply to me (us) as well. After all, we are online learners! 

Week 2, Performing research for my topic

The topic I chose for this week is "Online/Distance Education K-12". I choose this topic because I am a parent and the thought of homeschooling my children has crossed my mind. This led me to compare and contrast the advantages and disadvantages of of this topic, and even though this topic is research for my class; it has helped me with information needed to have a better understanding of homeschool and what works best for our family.

For my research I began by using Google. In the past I would normally read different website on Google in regards to whichever research I'm performing at the time but, since I have taken a class in my last semester that taught us how to find reliable sources I no longer resort to Google.
I choose to use our school's Library, mostly because I became accustomed to use EBSCoHost and I find it easy to find reliable, scholarly resources that have been peer reviewed by professionals in the same field. I tried to use resources that were .edu, .org, .gov and .pdf files. I looked for articles and journals where the authors used endnotes citations for their sources.

I have learned the importance of research and of using reliable sources and distinguishing between crowd sources such as Wikipedia. I am majoring in Psychology and in my field it is important to have information and research from professionals in my field, and information that is unbiased.