As of today, I have for the most part completed the information gathering phase of the independent research project. I spent most of the time in the last few weeks coming up with a topic that I could both find information on and that interested me. A secondary goal in choosing a topic was trying to pick something that could be directly related to our group project (the STRONG prototype). Our group had decided that as a general theme, we wanted to focus on design for education. I finally decided was what interested me the most dealt with designing curriculum. Research in this field also has an interesting learning component, as most curriculum is designed to help improve learning. However, I also found some interesting design challenges as I was doing my initial information gathering; a sort of design for the sake of learning.

Some initial questions that I had about research in this field are as follows:

• To what extent are the learning goals and outcomes of the curriculum addressed and fulfilled in classroom implementation?
  
• To what extent is the curriculum meeting the needs of students
  
• What evidence exists to document positive student performance trends for students participating in specialized curriculum?
  
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the existing curriculum in relation to the state of the art or best practices in education?
  
• How can new media and technologies actually improve the quality of curriculum, and not just give it a more aesthetic surface?
  

I have found that research answering the last two questions has been most prominent, and relates to our class in the most effective way. The concept of new media improving the curriculum for students, and how to design that new media so that curriculum (and hopefully learning) improves is what my research will focus on. This will of course also involve evaluating what the strengths and weaknesses are of the current curriculum are and how they can be improved.

Plan of Attack

In order to conduct the research in a reasonable amount of time, I need to focus my energy and do my best to try and come up with trends in the little amount of time I have. Obviously, there is not enough time to do a nation-wide field study, so a smaller "focus group" will have to suffice. The focus group will be a collection of local high school students (4 or 5). A series of two interviews will be made with this group. In the first, I will try to evaluate what the current strengths and weaknesses are in their curriculum. There will also be questions about their thoughts on how to improve it. Then, I will continue into more research about how new media is improving curriculum, and come up with a set of tools that I would then propose to the focus group to get their thoughts on. I am choosing high school students partly because I know some, and partly because I feel that high school education (for the most part) is a very structured environment.

In summary, my research will be two-fold. The first front will be evaluating existing curricula design in high schools. The second front will be to evaluate new media, and see if it can affectively assist in creating a better curriculum for students. The goal is to ultimately see how new media can affect curriculum design.

Interview Questions

The following are a list of questions that I have come up with so far that I would give to the focus group for the first interview. This list will most likely be ammended in the coming weeks:

• What is your current school schedule?
  
• What is the high point of your day/low point?
  
• Which current class is your favorite and why?
  
• Which current class is your least favorite and why?
  
• What is the best class you ever took and why?
  
• Pick the teacher you feel has had the biggest impact on your school career. Why did you choose this person?
  
• How many of your classes use computers in some form?
  
• What technologies do you use in your everyday life?
  

Curriculum Effective Studies

The STRONG Prototype

eCurricula