Learning Environment (Day 4)

Research instrument, WIHIC (What Is Happening In This Class?), was the highlight of today's learning journey. WIHIC questionnaire is widely used by School Climate researchers to collect information which will be used to assess the "health" of the learning environment.

Besides being taught how to use the WIHIC questionnaire, we were also led through a passage on how to administer the questionnaire as a researcher. As a principle rule, the researcher must administer the survey personally. This is to allow respondents to seek clarification if they have doubts about the questionnaire. A researcher must be punctual for the survey; read the instructions to the respondents; read out the items one by one; pause to answer questions; and count the number of questionnaires collected.

We have also learnt how to administer the data entry into the Excel Spreadsheet, and subsequently used these data to generate statistics on the reliability of data, item mean, scale mean, standard deviation and comparison of the preferred results vs actual results via the SPSS software.

The most challenging task of the day was to generate a research report with reference to these analysed information. We were lucky to have Dr Quek sharing with us in great details on how to draft a research report. She even showed us some samples to help ease our pain. Personally, I was quite amazed by the vast amount of works a research has to perform to genearte a good research report. And I strongly believed teamwork is the key to meet the submission dateline of our group project - the Research Report!