Impacts and Implications for Remote Data Collection in High School Classrooms

• In Event: Lessons Learned From Research During COVID-19: Strategies for Incorporating Remote Data Collection Beyond the Pandemic

Abstract

Two collaborating institutions are conducting a study to evaluate the efficacy of a classroom management program in high-school classrooms in the Midwest and West Coast. The program, called Discipline in the Secondary Classroom (DSC), helps teachers develop a classroom management plan that prevents problems, fosters student engagement, teaches students to behave responsibly, and creates a positive and productive classroom environment. As expected, school closures due to COVID-19 significantly impacted posttest data collection in the classrooms in the spring of 2020. The research teams used the 2020 summer to discuss plans to revise data collection protocols and shift all previous in-person activities to an online format for the 2020-2021 school year. We prioritized creating online systems that would be easy for participating teachers and students to navigate, as well as maintaining secure and reliable data.

Moving parent consent, student assent, assessments, and student/teacher survey links to an online Qualtrics format was a fairly seamless transition, and even allowed us to streamline the process now having immediate access to the data and cutting out travel time to school sites. The bigger challenge was modifying our existing protocol for conducting direct classroom and individual student observations. Traditionally, observations were conducted in the classroom, however, with distance learning all observation protocols were adapted for an online video conferencing format (e.g., WebEx or Google Meet). Adaptations included carefully monitoring the chat for student responses because most students did not have their video camera on and developing explicit rules about how to code for opportunities to respond when students responded in the chat versus aloud.

One of the biggest challenges working with classrooms and schools operating in a distance learning format was connecting personally with our teachers, both to build relationships with them as researchers, but also to allow them a more personal training and coaching experience for those in the intervention group in the study. However, implementing intervention activities (e.g., training, coaching) taking place in a remote format enabled us to use one of our partnering site’s coaches located in Missouri, and this gave both him and our teachers a lot of flexibility for scheduling coaching sessions.

While the pandemic and school closures certainly brought challenges to the project, it also allowed us to create and implement new and efficient data collection processes while still maintaining a positive relationship with the teachers and students. Additionally, fine-tuning and validating these new processes could allow and support innovative research and practice in rural and underserved communities since they remove barriers inherent in traditional data collection processes. In this session, presenters will describe some of the challenges of collecting data in a distance learning format and discuss the innovations and changes described above. As we prepare for the upcoming fall, we look forward to returning to classrooms for necessary in-person activities. We also look forward to continuing our use of some of the virtual adaptations to allow for a more efficient and streamlined data collection process.

Authors

• W. Carl Sumi, SRI International

• Madeline Cincebeaux, SRI International