Standard 4.3 - Reflection on Practice
"Candidates analyze and interpret data and artifacts and reflect on the effectiveness of the design, development and implementation of technology-supported instruction and learning to enhance their professional growth.." (AECT, 2012)
Description of Artifacts
To demonstrate proficiency in Standard 4.3 I have chosen two artifacts. The first is a critique of a pre-determined research article completed for Dr. Carol Parke during her course GREV 510: Statistics 1, taken during the fall 2017 semester. The objective of the assignment was to write a paper summarizing the purpose of the study, and then critiquing the methodology and analysis sections. The chosen study investigated whether a program designed by a school, aligned with a conceptual framework put forth by the National Middle School Association.
The second artifact was created for Dr. Misook Heo’s GDIT 703: Foundations of Instructional Technology, course taken during the summer semester of 2017. For this assignment we had to choose an educational data set, develop a narrative for the relationship of the items in the data, and then create a visual to show our findings using the Tableau software. For this project I analyzed the number of people in the US with a science degree between the years of 1999-2012. The data I used came from three different sources; the U.S. Department of Education, the National Center for Educational Statistics, and the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System.
Reflection and Rationale
To create the first artifact, I had to use my knowledge and skills learned during the course to evaluate whether the researchers conducted the study correctly and if the data collected was valid and reliable. While the study did not relate to the implementation of technology-supported instruction and learning directly, it did investigate the effectiveness of a program implemented at a school with the goal of supporting student achievement. Hence, I believe that this assignment helped me gain practice in assessing data and justifying the decisions that were made based on the data. The second artifact demonstrates my ability to create visuals of the data after analysis. As an instructional technologist I will be required to disseminate findings of studies to support decisions for the implementation of various technology-supported instructional programs. This means that I should be able to take the confusing data collected by a study and convert it to a visual to help stakeholders understand the data. By creating these two artifacts I have developed the knowledge and skills required to achieve this task. Therefore, I believe that these two artifacts demonstrate my proficiency in AECT’s Standard 4.3.
Artifact 15 - Article critique completed for GREV 510: Statistics 1
Artifact 16 - A screenshot of the interactive visual of the data analyzed using the Tableau software.