I would like to pick up on a comment Dr. Stadtlander made in her recent blog, about how challenging it can be to know how much to help the students versus doing parts of the work ourselves. I whole heartedly agree with Dr. Stadtlander in that I often find myself debating as to how many questions I ask of our students so as to stimulate their critical thinking versus my own wanting to provide the answer so that we in fact get to the answer. I hope you will excuse this analogy, but it reminds me greatly of parenting! I go through something similar to this with our nine year old daughter. Granted, my questions meant to foster my daughter's critical thinking are more in line with: 'What do *you* think would be a healthy snack?' or 'What do *you* think it means to be a good friend' - but you get my point.
It can therefore be hard to know if/when students are getting what they need. Consequently, I find it helpful to hear from students in multiple venues (via blog, conference calls, emails, jounral entries, and in the classroom).
Another challenge I see in our work at this time is that we are working on qualitative data analysis which is much less structured, in my humble opinion, than is quantitative work. As a result of this, students can find this part of the work unclear so we continue to do our best to anchor the qualitative data analysis tasks at hand.
AES
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