Week 5

This week’s research has made me realized that the studies in the psychological factors that influence student academic achievement have been happening fairly recently.  The information that I have been coming across seems to concentrate on research that is less than 30 years old. And most of this seems to be from the past 10-15 years. 

As far as the focus of my question, I think that I am very happy with it at this point, my research question is, “What psychological factors can teachers utilize to increase student engagement in the classroom?" and Professor Woolley did help me narrow it down.   In all honesty there was a couple of articles in the resources that did catch my eye it was “Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents” by Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M.E.P and “Teaching adolescents to become learners. The role of noncognitive factors in shaping school performance: A critical literature review”, by Farrington, C. A., Roderick, M., Allensworth, E., Nagaoka, J., Keyes, T. S., Johnson, D. W.  I think that both of these articles would be very helpful for my research as they both focus on a child’s ability to learn versus “how smart they might be”.

I think that my research skills have improved greatly over the course of the past 5 weeks.  I already had some prior experience using Ensco Host, but learning how to narrow down my subject has been very helpful.  What has really helped me the most has been learning that I should not think of research as just looking up a keyword, instead I need to use controlled vocabulary.  Learning how to use controlled vocabulary has made things much better, now I can try to narrow down to a specific word or phrase that will encompass what I’m researching without it needing to be exact words.