The first thing my Professor said to me in our meeting this week is that she realized we had a serious problem with the software we planned to use to input our cleaned data to help draw out themes, Dedoose. She realized it would take us hours and weeks to upload everything, putting us off schedule, which meant we had to start looking at other options. We got very lucky as my professor already had a subscription to another software, HyperResearch, from years ago, and the log in code still worked, saving us about $500.
After dodging that bullet, we determined that our next goal would be to finish cleaning the last two lengthy interviews, and start making a list of all the possible sensitive information about the teachers, students, and the school. This way we could begin to develop codes for these people and programs and do another round of data cleaning, to protect the identities of everyone involved in the study.
I took on the more recent of the two interviews, where I heard the leadership team of the school talk about their journey to fully implementing Universal Design for Learning at their school. I still enjoyed cleaning this week, which I realize I won’t be able to say for much longer, and noticed a few key things in the process.
The teachers mentioned that they switched their concept of UDL from something only used in special education to target struggling students, but something that can be used in the general education classroom to serve all students. This is closely linked with their move to become a fully inclusive school, meaning all children with special needs would receive their appropriate services in the classroom instead of in a separate setting, both of which proved to be pivotal in their successful implementation. Also within this interview, I picked up on something that could be a possible code later on, which got me a bit giddy.