Going into this course I was very nervous about how the class would go because I have a hard time understanding computers and at doing analysis in general. The first few weeks of class were very overwhelming for this same reason. Something that really helped me get through this was to do the homework the night before class then taking time to review my notes and skim the chapter again right before class started. It allowed me to already have a good understanding of the material then going into class I had my notes ready and I was able to ask questions about anything I didn’t understand. Another thing that helped me was getting to take the quizzes more than once. I liked this aspect of the class, not because it gave me an opportunity to get a better grade, but because it showed me what I got wrong and let me go through my steps again to see where I went wrong so that I didn’t make the same mistake in the future.

Doing this class as an online class was extremely difficult for me. I learn better in face to face environments so having to do everything online was stressful. Luckily, we only had one more worksheet to do when we went to online learning, so it wasn’t a major issue for me, but working on the project was a difficult task because everyone has different schedules at home and it’s hard to contact people at times. With all of that being said, I really enjoyed doing the project. I learned about making my own survey and running through an entire research project with my own data, instead of just looking up the data then writing a paper. As an international studies major, I have never had to run my own data before this class, even for my capstone, so it was really interesting to take a class where everything came together, and I had an opportunity to do my own research.

I struggled on the last four worksheets and I think it’s because they got more in-depth and combined several different concepts from other worksheets. I found that on most of the worksheets I didn’t have an issue with running the actual data on SPSS, my issue was interpreting the data and trying to figure out exactly what the question was asking for. Asking questions in class clarified a lot of my questions about the worksheets and I would have struggled more if I didn’t have the opportunity to ask those questions. This changed my outlook on my learning in the class because I knew that I would understand if I asked the right questions, but I feel like the pivot point in the class was when we switched to only working on the group project.

The group project took everything we had learned in the class and allowed us to put that to use in a real-life situation. The worksheets provided a solid base for everything that we needed to do our project on our own, but it gave us the chance to use them in different scenarios. For instance, because my group used several different variables and we had to run different tests on those data. I think that this solidified my learning from this class because it showed me how to apply all of the concepts that I learned from the eight worksheets to our own data that we understood, because we were the ones to collect it. I learned a lot more from my data than I did learning from data from a book because I knew the tests I needed to run to get the correct information to analyze it for our research. For example, I needed to run a means comparison test to compare the outcome of  the data and I knew the tests to run, but when I did it from the book I had a harder time understanding which tests to run because I honestly didn’t understand the data that I was looking at.

This class allowed me to understand the fundamentals of how to run and analyze data but the pivot point in my learning was when I had to apply it to my own research. I think that the group project is a good was to solidify everything we learned earlier in the semester and allowed us to carry the concepts into our own type of learning. It was really helpful to put the concepts into a different situation where we are forced to apply them and get our own outcomes in order to move forward in our research as a whole.