In the file above I’ve compiled the final round of data that I got from the questionnaire that I sent out in order to better understand the impact of my interventions on the change in student attitudes to research.
Nine students filled out this questionnaire – a smaller sample size than the 11-15 students who contributed data at each of the other data points. As the sample size is smaller, I consider it holistically, along side the other data.
From this questionnaire I can see that:
- Several students went on self-organized research trips to help them with their final outcomes to different sites including archives (like the BFI), nature (like Walthamstow Wetlands), museums (like the Wellcome Collection and the Hunterian Museum) and libraries (like the British Library). In this way my prompt was somewhat succesful as students did design and carry out their own research trips unsupervised. This questionnaire gives me an additional understanding of the range of sites visited by student – which is wide.
- Interestingly, only the Wellcome Collection actually featured on the directory that I gave the students. In other data I also found only one trip taken from the list – one trip to the Tate. This shows the students felt equipped to make their own decisions on what constituted a research trip.
- In the future, I would be interested in understanding further why they didn’t use more of the places on the directory. Was it because they didn’t align with their interests, and was there a way the list could be improved? Or perhaps some students did use the list but didn’t respond to the questionnaire.
- The questionnaire data also shows that, in general, students feel they are likely to revisit archives, natural sites and galleries for their future research. Even though they didn’t mention them specifically in the Point B data collection, from the written responses in the questionnaire, there is a sense that students found the trips I took them on useful for various different reasons.
I can conclude from looking at this data, alongside previously analysed data, that it is fair for me to assume my interventions played a significant role in shifting student perceptions and practices of research.