Postgraduate Proposal - Assessing the Impact of 1-to-1 Laptops on Student Performance

After worrying that Twitter might be distracting me from my studies I had an epiphany following a conversation with Doug Belshaw, rather than view Twitter as a distraction, use it instead to connect my PLN with my studies via this blog. Thus potentially I will gain much needed constructive criticism, critical friends and encouragement along the tough road of postgraduate study. (Thanks Doug!)

As an initial post on my studies the original proposal from May 2010 is included. I enrolled in July 2010 i.e. Semester 2. The timeline however has been updated and is accurate as of June 2011. Please read the proposal below (5 pages) plus further comments at the bottom of this blog post. (For some reason this has a weird font on the iPad...)
Postgraduate Proposal for Simon Crook - A Research Study to Assess the Impact of 1-to-1 laptops on Student Performance
As with any study it has evolved and changed from the original proposal. Important points to note are:

1. ostensibly I am a MSc student, however, the scope of this research is easily PhD. The understanding is that once I have made an initial publication (hopefully by the end of the year) it will roll over into a full PhD
2. Research Question 3 may well be dropped
3. Research Question 4 has already been dropped, it would be a PhD in it's own right.
4. This study will focus specifically on 1-to-1 laptops rather than scrutinising the DER as I do not want to get into a political debate and analysis
5. 2009 SC and 2011 HSC are important epochs as in each instance, for the surveyed schools, we essentially have 50/50 have/have-nots regarding 1-to-1 laptops
6. Even though the title refers to examining student performance in Science the initial two 'crude' analyses will be for all School Certificate courses: Science, English, Mathematics, History, Geography and Computer Skills
7. The 2009 SC data is historical data from prior to the commencement of my studies
   
8. The student and teacher survey data will be used to measure student and teacher efficacies to use as variables in the 'richer' analyses.
9. To whet your appetite for future posts, the 'crude' analyses of the 2009 and 2010 data each have over 27,000 records: over 4,500 students in 6 subjects. This is big potatoes!
   

For those of you that have had the time and inclination to read all of this I would appreciate any feedback you may have to offer. Thanks for the help!!! I will endeavour to add further posts outlining my initial analysis methods and findings in due course.

Cheers

Simon