Field Notes

We started our study started on Friday 11/2. We send out the reading in the morning and responses come in throughout the day. Ava and I decided to switch back and forth on who is in charge of the spending and receiving answers. I skim over the responses so that I can tell if the person actually did the reading. I then check off each person as they send in their answer so that I can keep track of who has and hasn’t responded yet. This helps later in the evening so I know who to send a reminder to. I send out a reminder to do the reading at about 8-9pm. If I am still awake I will send out another one a hour or so later to the people who still haven’t responded.

We started a day later than we planned due to the fact that we didn’t have enough people. We still didn’t have as many people as we wanted but couldn’t put it off further due to the length. Using email has not been quite as useful as we hoped. Sometimes the emails randomly aren’t recognized or for some reason don’t send. We had multiple problems with that on the first day. However, we are figuring it out and I think we will have it all sorted out soon. The other problem that we have faced has been that some people aren’t fully participating. Even though we have sent out reminders, they still don’t send a response to the day’s reading. We were expecting some of this, which is partly why we hoped to have more people. If they miss too many days they won’t be useful to our study, leaving us with less data when we didn’t really have enough to start with. So far we have seen some positive feedback. People have expressed their enjoyment of the material in the responses that they send back to us, showing that individual readings have brought benefit by bringing enjoyment. It is too early to tell if reading every day will benefit students but the positive feedback is an encouraging sign that it will be beneficial.