Week 7 & 8: Difficulties & Fixes

Greetings Everyone!

      The last two weeks have been very busy and rewarding for this research. I am aware that there is no blog for week 7 and I had a reason for that. During week 7, I had hit a wall in my project. There were many difficulties that were causing me to put the project on a pause. And I wanted to combine week 7 and 8 to describe what happened and how it was fixed.
      So let's rewind a little bit. During Week 6, I had finally gotten two dyslexia centers to cooperate with the research. They had agreed to letting me to test my questionnaire on their students. I was very excited by this achievement; however, one of the dyslexia centers decided to discontinue themselves from the agreement. I was slightly bummed but still happy that I had partnership with at least one dyslexia center. Fast forward to Wednesday of Week 7: The center emailed out all their parents about my research asking if they would be willing to help. A few parents responded, but it was not enough to gain data for my research. At that point, I was stuck; I wasn't sure on what to do. It also didn't help that the test run we were simultaneously conducting was not working at its full potential due to some issues.
     Okay...enough with my sappy sad story of week 7. Let's just take Elsa's advice and 'Let it go!'

#Sorrynotsorry

      In research, there will always be a time where it seems like you have hit a dead end. Trust me, that's a good thing, because that lets you know that the research is working. It also taught me how to solve problems and move forward. Persistence and optimism were the words of the week.

Week 8: 'After a storm, there is always a rainbow'

      During the weekend between week 7 and week 8, I sat down and analyzed all the problems. And I came up with several solutions and new ideas. (See, troubles aren't so bad). One good thing came out from my brainstorming was my idea of running three different tests simultaneously. Initially, we were only running the test to calculate our positive predicted value. But after researching more about the dyslexia center, I learned that the center not only tutored children with dyslexia but also other learning disabilities. So I decided to test the negative predicted value and the false positive value. This opened my research to a bigger audience at the center, which increased the amount of data I collected this week. 

      I was a common visitor at the learning center this week. Every day for an hour, I would sit in the center and ask the parents if they would be willing to fill out the questionnaire. The parents were very supportive and were quite happy that I was carrying out such a research that would potentially help other kids from saving them from the problems their child faced from a late diagnosis. With the data that I collected, I was able to say that our questionnaire does not pre-assess for other learning disabilities besides dyslexia. But also, my data showed that we may have to tweak the questionnaire to make the pre-assessment more accurate for dyslexia. Thank you so much for tuning in! I am so excited to see where this research will go from here.

Until next time, 

Ritika Gupta:)