This PDF links to the project that I conducted to complete my Master of Education degree. In this project, I had teachers and other adults read a short paragraph outlining the demographic information of a child (socio-economic status and race) and then listen to an audio clip of a student talking about a lesson that they were taught. In the audio, the student either described a transgression event that happened in the lesson or described just the lesson. The adults then had to complete a questionnaire about how credible they thought that child was.
On average, students who disclosed the transgression were seen as less honest but more intelligent than students who did not disclose the event (it’s important to note here that none of the tests yielded significant results).
While completing this project, I learned a lot about the research process and less about how students disclose transgressions. The learning was largely experiential and it was a good capture of the bureaucracies of university research.
Johnson-UREAP-completeThis PDF links to the Research Project that I completed in 2017 about Children and Secret Telling. In this study, we had students watch one of two science shows and in one of them, there would be an incident in which the person performing the show spilt a glass of water on a cell phone and then asked the audience not to tell anyone that they had split it because they would get in trouble. The audience then had time to chat with a peer who had watched the other science show and tell them about it. After their peer chat, they were interviewed by a researcher about the show they watched. And what did we find? That the students were pretty tight-lipped! Almost none of them told their peer or the researcher about the discretion.
Doing this research project was incredibly valuable for my future as a student and as a teacher. I learned how daycares and preschools run (from going into them to collect data) and about how small children communicate with each other and adults.