Project by: Ricky Castillo (11th Grade)
Project Advisor: Charlene Cruz-Cerdas
Student(s)’s Advisor(s): James French
Description of the Project:
The project I am proposing initially focused on the question: Does out-of-school influences (family SES, neighborhood safety/crime, poverty [free/reduced lunch], family involvement, the availability and quality of child care, violence in student’s life, students expectations/motivation/engagement, physical and mental health issues, mindset) have a bigger impact on educational achievement than the school characteristics (i.e. expenditures per pupil; teacher degrees; test scores)? The question revealed how I would need the grades of my peer to measure the impact of out-of-school influences and school characteristics on educational achievement. Knowing how unfeasible that was, I narrowed my focus to one out of school influence, student motivation, and engagement. The project will specifically look at this in the context of COVID and the impact it has had on student motivation and engagement.
Final Product:
Website: https://22josec.wixsite.com/website
Data Compiled – Student Motivation
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Open in new tab Final Reflection on Learning:
I learned a lot about storytelling. Hearing around 160 responses on an experience during a pandemic was a lot. It made me uncomfortable and forced me to reevaluate my life. I choose to make a website to somehow produce a platform to raise people’s voices and bring awareness to the issue. I do realize that there will be minimal activity on a free website made within a week (with unfinished parts) but I am glad I got the experience of channeling something I am passionate about into a website. My hope will be that I use this and take it to create actual change in a school that prides itself in raising student voice.
Update on Progress from Weeks 1-3:
These first few weeks were full of research and attempting to narrow down the focus of my honors project. I started with forming questions and attempting to form a hypothesis. Charlene helped me start off my research with the controversial book “The Bell Curve” by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. I began with a skeptical view of the book after learning that students at Middlebury college protested against him believing he was racist. Critics called Murray’s argument intellectually shoddy, racist, and dangerous. Reading the entirety of the book, I learned that genetic and environmental variables were involved in the manifestation of intelligence. Murray stated that between 40% and 80% of the variability in IQ / intelligence is due to genetics. That was something I found trouble believing as I have seen firsthand how an environment can have an overruling effect on the intelligence of a child. I questioned how accurate an IQ test is with measuring intelligence and whether you can really measure genetics. I then went on to read “Unequal Childhoods” by Annette Lareau and learned the importance of child-rearing and parenting. I learned how parent’s expectations and involvement in their child’s education can have a great effect on their educational attainment. The next step was using this new-found knowledge to narrow down my research question. I found that I wished to answer the question: Is educational achievement (i.e. grades, test scores, GPA, difficulty of courses) more affected by quality of school (i.e. expenditures per pupil; teacher degrees; test scores) than environmental circumstances (family SES, neighborhood safety/crime, poverty [free/reduced lunch]) of a student?
Although this question did include most of my thoughts, I felt strongly that through motivation and engagement a student stuck in poverty or in what is considered to be a bad home environment could attain high levels of education. But is that due to a higher quality school or something deeper? This is just a theory and to test it may prove difficult. My next steps will involve coming up with a research question and hypothesis which will set the stage for my project.
Combined Update of Progress from Weeks 4-9:
Update! My research questions are as follows:
- How has student engagement and motivation in schools been impacted during the pandemic? How has that impacted their learning?
- How do public schools compare in the response to moving classes remotely and accounting for students’ mindset?
My hypothesis reads as follows:
- The pandemic has provided an unprecedented amount of negative impacts (worsened mental health, isolation, less social development…) for students that school and parents have somewhat failed to manage.
After weeks of research and narrowing all my ideas. I came up with these questions and a hypothesis. The next step was attempting to test my hypothesis and hopefully answering these questions. In the end, I fell short, with being unable to compare to a public school and also seeing the effect parents had when managing their own child’s mental health. I created 3 google forms that would test this hypothesis for the 9th, 10th, and 11th-12th grades. The results were around 40 students per grade making it a little overwhelming especially when hearing such personal stories. I decided at the end to compile the data I recieved and to write an analysis. At the center of this data, I learned that despite a lack of motivation and student engagement students were able to succeed academically because it is easier to cheat during this time of the pandemic. From this mass of data and stories and honesty, I felt a need to do something and share these stories in whatever form possible. I did this through a website that would educate, initiating dialogues, share stories, and bring an action within the community. My expectation is that there will be minimal activity on an unpaid, unfinished website and other problems like having to make an account to actually share in a message board. With these limitations comes a learning experience which I am glad I was able to be a part of. I learned how important storytelling and truthfully how to make a website and what potential a platform for student voices can have. Although I regret not extending this honors project into trimester 3, I will continue this honors project in a way by asking the question of why students cheat.
