Week 9
Generative Research
This week we delivered our stage 3 presentation. Below is a summary of our exploratory research insights as well as the generative research approach.
Exploratory Research Insights
What we heard…
Problematic Grading System — Current quantitative evaluation in education can be problematic. There’s a need for new methods to evaluate students’ progress.
Communication Channels — Parents and schools need more communication channels to build trust.
Collaborative Classroom — Both students and teachers seek a collaborative environment so that students can experience failure with confidence.
Socio-emotional Skills — Students, teachers, and parents all value the school environment, as it helps students develop skills to communicate and collaborate with others.
Personalized Education — Students can actively engage in learning through personalized education and collaborative classroom.
Future-ready Mindset — Teachers need to be motivated and trained to be models of future-ready learners.
Updated problem statement
How might we enhance school engagement for students from immigrant families and support them to develop a sense of personal and interpersonal agency so they feel confident in facing future challenges?
Generative Research
Our generative research consisted of persona-building workshops and collage-building activities conducted in partnership with our participants. The goal of these activities was to capture our participant's current mindset and get them to think about what might be similar, or different, in 10 years. We wanted to understand their hopes, concerns, goals, and barriers as they envision themselves in the year 2031.
We also wanted to know how did their immigrant background might affect their view on their educational and community experience.
Persona building workshops
Before we started working with our student participants, we wanted to test our persona-building workshops with a few classmates from our cohort. Per the feedback we received from them, we adjusted the allotted time for each activity (increasing it from 10mins to 15mins), increased the size of the boards so the participants did not need to spend time adjusting content, and made other adjustments to our approach. Once we made the adjustments to the workshop protocol and Miro board, we conducted our first workshop.
We have currently conducted 4 interviews with stakeholder participants who are or have been involved in the K-12 education space. These include 2 California high school students, 1 sophomore college student, and one parent who move from the US to Hong Kong six years ago and is considering what it would look like to raise his family in a foreign land.
One of the most fruitful aspects of the workshops was the ability to hear the participants think. A participant would move a photo to the board and explain what they were feeling at that moment. We would then take notes and follow up with questions when appropriate.
For example, we talked with Jill, who is a 15-year-old sophomore in a public school in California. Jill is a first-generation American, meaning she’s a native-born citizen or resident of a country whose parents are foreign-born.
In the future, Jill aspires to be a pediatrician and has a strong desire to become independent. She opened up to us as she was developing her future persona board.
“Being independent will help me in the future with my work and when I get older. In the future my parents won’t be behind me, so I want to be independent.”
We also talked to another student who expressed worry about the limitations of the resources her parents could afford her given their immigrant status.
“My parents live to survive… Sometimes I think I can’t do it, since no one in the family did. I have to look for other people’s help because no one in the family knows enough.”
We concluded that there is an interesting opportunity space emerging.
Next steps
We have developed three concepts that we are developing and plan to test with a broader set of immigrant student participants.
During our stage 3 presentation, we heard feedback about making sure we include the Hispanic immigrant student perspective and we have since reached out to schedule workshops with students from this background.
