Wildwood Evaluation Project

Section 4

submitted by Sue Bogren, Team Davis
October 26,1998

Davis Team interactions for Section 4 took place asynchronously for about a week before a seventy-five minute WebBoard chat with all six members of our team present.  During this chat we 1) discussed our WebBoard chat of the week before with Principal Lee Daniels and WJHS Technology Coordinator, Roger Wildabette, 2) determined the information still needed to complete our evaluation, and 3) reached consensus on how we will complete our final report.

Methods

In section 4 we continued using a qualitative approach as we pursued our email interviews with Wildwood Junior High School faculty and the principal, Lee Daniels.   We also corresponded with Wynne County district personnel Judy Frank, Evaluation Specialist;  Tom Barrett, Technology Coordinator;   and Superintendent Jan Swenson.    Superintendent Swenson and Ms. Frank have responded.  We are waiting for a response fron Mr. Barrett.  In addition, we were able to meet and engage Principal Daniels and WJHS Technology Coordinator, Roger Wildabette in a dialogue via Webboard chat on Tuesday, October 13.

Our initial email communication has allowed us to make unstructured observations about the workings of WJHS and to begin developing relationships with the WJHS stakeholders.  From these observations we have been able to refine both the focus of our evaluation and our evaluation questions.  Worthen, et al. (p.381-382) provided us with helpful information for developing the interview questions which we used for our latest round of interviews.

Teachers are busy people with a limited amount of time available.  Our team chose email interviews because we felt it would provide the least intrusive way for us to obtain information.  Teachers and administrators could answer our questions at a time convenient to them.  We chose to interview all teachers with a Web page at the Wildwood site because they are a diverse group and provide a sampling of the teaching faculty.   While these teachers represent most of the departments at WJHS, we have information from only those teachers who have demonstrated by their Web pages an interest in using communication technology.  It does not give us access to those teachers who have little interest or training in this area.

As our dialogue with WJHS staff has progressed, we have had to make some ethical decisions regarding our intervention in their technology development.  In our Webboard chat with Principal Daniels and Technology Coordinator Wildabette we felt there was a willingness on their part to allow us to write the school technology plan.  We concluded that becoming too involved in the development of the plan would compromise our role as external evaluators.  Since this phase of the evaluation is a formative one, we decided to encourage them to use the information provided in the formative evaluation for help in developing their technology plan.

Data Collected

   

Needs/Concerns

Information Still Needed

During the Team Davis WebBoard chat we determined that we still need some information that we were unable to get from our WebBoard chat conversations with Principal Daniels and Tech Coordinator Roger Wildabette.  Part of the reason for this had to do with the kinds of questions we were asking, but since completing the readings, especially the Worthen, et al., we were able to formulate more specific questions.  To obtain the needed information we decided that each of us would email one or two members of the WJHS staff to ask these questions:
 

Had we had more time and access to the faculty as a whole, we would have considered using more quantitative methods to gather information.  The design of our evaluation lends itself to the use of questionnaires or surveys for gathering information from the faculty pertaining to their experiences with training and in-service opportunities.  In addition, it would be most interesting to have done a pre- and post-workshop survey of teacher attitudes toward learning technologies.