As I have learned throughout my courses in the Education Department at Eastern, both the undergraduate and graduate levels, it is important to teach the students how to learn. Just like the Chinese Proverb- “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”  Education goes beyond telling our students information.  More importantly, we should be teaching students how to seek out information independently, critical inquiry skills.  I have found that research is one of the most important skills a student should learn.  There are so many resources available to students with the advancements in technology.   Beyond the need for gathering information, the positive effects that research can give a student include high self-efficacy and a sense of independence, which is so important during high school years.  There has been extensive research conducted on the positive influences of self-efficacy on student motivation.  Multiple articles, journals and books describe the necessity of a sense of self, including high self-efficacy and self competency, in order to be motivated and determined in the academic sphere.  During my Educational Technology program, I conducted a study on the effects research projects have of self efficacy (Appendix J).  Much of the research supports the idea that autonomy in assignments promotes student motivation and intrinsic value of such assignments. 

The research projects I create are designed to give students much freedom.  My spring research project, titled “The Fire Project” because it is inspired by the Billy Joel song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” allows students to choose virtually any subject or topic that occurred during their lifetime and research it (Appendix K).  They have to take the evidence they found and create a thesis that they must prove regarding that topic.  To kick off the project, I play the song for the students and have them analyze the song.  As a class, we go to the library three times over the course of three weeks to conduct the research, which they may use the books in the library or articles from online databases.  With such wide parameters on research projects, it is important that students understand the expectations and standards. At Norwich Free Academy, the faculty created a campus wide research guide to assist students with such tasks as work cited formatting, in-body citations and notecards (Appendix L). 

For the Fire Project, no two students are allowed to have the same topic in a class because, as incoming freshmen, many of them have not been held accountable for academic integrity issues and this is away to prevent collusion.  For my Social, Legal and Ethics course, I created a PowerPoint on the issue academic integrity at Norwich Free Academy (Appendix M).  As it ends up, I have used this same presentation to point out the important points of the policy to the students.  It is important that students are presented with clear expectations and are then held accountable for those standards.

            According to Schunk and Pajares (2002), self-efficacy “refers to the beliefs that one is able to learn or perform specific tasks” (p.17) and it has been shown to improve over time, making it more important to students at an older age, stressing the need for more research of the effects at a high school level.  Pintrich and Zusho (2002) found that  “students who believe they have the capabilities to perform or learn the task are much more likely to report using self-regulatory strategies as well as do better on the task itself” (p.268).  According to Schunk (1989), the self-efficacy theory suggests “that self-efficacy influences choice of activities, persistence, effort, expenditures, and task accomplishments” (p. 21).  Schunk (1989) asserts that  students judge what they will learn, what knowledge and skills are required for new learning, how well they can recall already learned skills needed, how easily they have learned similar skills in the past, how well they can follow instruction, and how they can self-regulate their level of understanding.  

            In my experience with the Fire Project, students definitely gain a sense of autonomy with their subject, especially if it’s a topic that I am unfamiliar with, and I tell the students that its an opportunity for them to teach me something.  Since they were able to choose the subject of the paper, the self-motivation exists and is fueled by their success in finding information on their subject.  For the more recent subject, students rely heavily on the online databases and information online. 

It has been researched and supported that student autonomy can foster self-determination, thus having positive effects on self-efficacy.  We can only do so much with the students while we have them, so it is important to focus on skills that they can use in the future, beyond the classroom.