Making Sense of Evidence

Once you have gathered evidence and data, it can sometimes be a challenge to make sense of what you are seeing. Often, evidence around student learning can add to complexity or confusion by giving you too much data. Or perhaps the evidence is difficult to interpret because the reasons for student confusion appear opaque or contradictory.

In some cases, faculty look at evidence of student learning and try to make sense of separate elements or difficulties. In this example, Jay Cho of Pasadena City College uses a voice-over track on a video of a student “think aloud” to reveal his response to each dimension of student difficulty, ranging from procedural (helping students add negative numbers) to attitudinal (helping students learn to work backwards from wrong answers and not lose confidence).

Sometimes the initial evidence you gather is not sufficient to justify taking a next step. For example, after an initial analysis of her student performance data, Katie Hern (Chabot College) felt the need to conduct student interviews in order to look beyond her gradebook data–which revealed that 51% of her students who did not complete the course had received at least a passing grade on a major assignment–and acheive a better understanding of the data’s reasons and causes. This then enabled her to take a further step from descriptive cases to a more fully developed framework for understanding the problem.

REFLECTION PROMPT: If you have gathered evidence as part of an inquiry project, share your own strategies for making sense of the evidence. What puzzled you? What worked well? Did you share with colleagues? Devise additional ways to contextualize or flesh out the evidence you had.

Navigate to other pages in the Faculty Inquiry Cycle:

November 13, 2008