Over the past two weeks our team has been solidifying our group methodology.  Since we are teaching different grades with different schedules (e.g., some are departmentalized, some are not), we are also beginning to individualize our methodologies according to our classrooms. We presented our group methodology to our research Grad school class tonight and received some very helpful feedback.  Our classmates appreciated how organized and specific our methodology is so far.  One of our classmates asked about the time interval that some of our group members plan to collect data:  several of us plan to check if students are exhibiting off-task behaviors every thirty seconds during two fifteen minute time periods (one before the brain break and one following the brain break).  Is that too difficult?  Would collecting data every minute suffice?  This is a valid concern, and one that I have wondered about myself.  Based on the research our team conducted for the literature review, thirty seconds is a commonly used time frame for a single subject study (the type of study we are doing) because it shows what students are doing on a regular basis.  Another classmate suggested having a back-up brain break in mind in case the first ones we implement are not effective. We appreciated this suggestion, and recognize that if we did need to do this, we would also need to address it in our analysis.

We are excited that the details of our research project are becoming clearer!