Please see attached the following documents: Ethical Action Plan, Participant Information Sheet and lastly the Participant Consent Form.
Change of plans
Within the project I had initially planned to design the new learning pathway documents, implement it and then review its success by analysing the completed documents at the end of the term, in line with what the students had aimed to complete. Followed up by an interview with the students to highlight any areas of difficulty, benefit of confusion.
Although I do stick by how this initial plan would of given a great overview to how successful the project was and highlighting any resistance, the reality is the action research project began at the start of the students term, and by the time document (the action) could be prepared (or even rushed through) would already have been very late in their projects meaning that current students would be uprooted from what they were already used to, even if not perfect, which ultimately would have unfairly disrupted the students at an already stressful time period – especially when you consider that some of the students had been working within the technical area over multiple terms. Especially for MA students whose final projects align with this unit.
With this in mind, I spoke to my tutor Tim about how this would negatively impact my students and instead I suggested that I could produce the proposed structure/document and present it to my students and the end of the term. This way I could use their current terms experience as a direct comparison for feedback, to see if they thought this structure could/would have supported them and their work; which Tim agreed was a good alternative angle to maintain the project. As previously mentioned in a previous blog post I did however make small changes where possible such as implementing a new booking system to help manage time which was greatly received by the students.
Anonymity Concerns
One of the great aspects of my job is that I get to work with a very small number of students compared to many other technical areas, this over time may increase but for now is on a nice trajectory. This is great for a day to day role as it makes for a great learning environment where students from a whole plethora of courses get to meet and interact on similar projects whilst sharing knowledge and skills from their chosen disciplines. When it comes to writing a paper, however, it’s a different story as it makes my students highly identifiable from a range of different information such as their projects, courses, skill base and of course the low sample data. With this in mind one of the first feedbacks I got from Tim was that with the initial plan to analyse the students completed pathway documents it would be impossible to sanitise the documents to provide proper anonymity. Luckily one of the additional benefits of changing how the action would be reviewed meant that a lot of the personal information would no longer be collected and instead just the focus group would be recorded making it much easier to protect the identity of my students.
In the end I received 6 completed consent forms for the six students who attended my focus group. All of which have been stored securely. The focus group will be covered later in its own post.
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