Final Optional Blog Post

   This post discusses my original claim that I am making for my research argument.  My original claim involves the student perspectives on technology and why they are so important.  My data for this argument includes surveys that I distributed to fifty students on the UCF campus randomly.  This post discusses the challenges I faced when coming up with my original argument and what I can do better next time I have to make an original claim for research. Moreover, I discuss who will care about my argument and why it is my own.  Finally, I talk about what I can do to revise my original claim before I turn in my final project.

         While building an original argument for my research on how technology has impacted college students in their education, I faced many challenges.  From analyzing my secondary sources, I found that the reoccurring major gap in the research was the fact that student perspectives had not been analyzed as much as they needed to be. Thus, I decided to build my original claim around the findings of student perspectives.  I decided that conducting a survey would be the most efficient way to collect this type of data.  However, building and conducting the survey led to challenges.  First off, it was difficult in deciding how many students I would distribute the survey to.  If I picked too small of a number than the data may have been unrealistic, and my original argument would have been skewed.  On the other hand, I needed to make sure I picked a number that was not too large and fit under the time constraint. In the end, I decided that fifty students was an adequate number of students to survey.  Another challenge I faced was how I was going to compare my findings from the survey to other data.  Since little data existed that actually viewed the student attitudes, I knew I was going to have trouble making sure my data was in fact credible.   

            Next time I am asked to establish an original claim in my research, I will consider my options more extensively.  After reading through my peer-reviewed articles, right away I knew that I wanted to build my original argument around student perspectives.  Therefore, I somewhat jumped to quickly to conclusions.  I did not give any other original claims a thought.  I know I could have taken my research in a different direction and analyzed the actually technology that makes up the classroom experience by interviewing professors.  Thus, I know next time I will weigh my options more efficiently. 

            As I said before, my claim is how the students feel about using technology in their education instead of the teacher perspectives, and the overall impact it has had on grades. This argument is original because I have collected my own data through the surveys.  I designed each of the questions on the survey and then distributed them outside of the Student Union at UCF.  This will add to the conversation since the student feelings are not talked about as much in the research arguments that have already been conducted and published. I am taking this data and explaining why or why not students want technology in their classroom.  I am also using student quotes from the survey to show the benefits and negatives of technology. Overall, my stakeholders, the academics reading and writing my topic, will appreciate this research since it does in fact attempt to fix the gap in the lack of student perspectives. 

On the other hand, I know my claim still needs to be revised before I turn in my final project. I need to explain why it is so important to my topic to know about student attitudes toward technology.  If technology has truly helped students’ grades then why should it matter how the students feel about it? This is major aspect of my claim that I need to continue to work on.