Probably my main findings!

Mood:  a-ok
Now Playing: This is the night (Clay Aiken)

I haven’t posted something in this blog for so long and I’ve been procrastinating doing it as well – just like writing my thesis I guess. Anyway, I think I’ve finished all my data analysis and currently writing up Chapter 5 (yes I know I’ve been doing that for 4 months now!) – but hopefully it will finally come to fruition.

I think there are some fantastic findings (according to the quantitative data analysis) – here are the summary of my findings as I told Doug yesterday during my supervision meeting:

1. Students who used the black-box software were more likely to score higher than those students using the glass-box and the open-box. Although students using the black-box seemed to perform less than students using the glass-box and open-box in the interpretive tasks (not certain if this is significant as yet – since I have to do a contrast test).
2. Further, students who had a high maths’ confidence performed better than students with low maths confidence in the interpretive task, but both groups performed equally well (or equally bad!) in the constructive task.
3. Further, it seems that when it came to students exploring with the software (i.e. testing numbers etc.), students who were using the black-box and had a high maths’ confidence were more likely to explore. However, interestingly – students using the open-box and the glass-box software and who had a high maths confidence hardly did any explorations in comparison to the students with the low confidence. In fact, the students with the low maths’ confidence who used the glass-box and open-box did more explorations than students’ with low maths’ confidence using the black-box (but got to check and see if these explorations amount are significantly different).
4. Students who started with the abstract problem (Problem 3) made less explanations (both maths and real-life) than students who started with the application problems (Problems 1 and 2). Possibly here is something about moving from concrete to abstract or vice versa.

I think these findings are looking good and definitely something worthy of a PhD thesis (well I feel so 😀 ) – and I should continue to do so if I expect to keep my optimism in making sure my PhD is worthy – my only one worry now is finishing the writing up by September!