RESEARCH QUESTION:

How can we improve student interaction from lab to lab and from student to admin?

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

Eastland is a Career Technical school with only a junior and senior class. While it usually does deal with student interactions and school spirit since our school doesn’t exactly run as regular schools do it makes it harder for everybody /student body and admin/ to find something to collaborate everybody in. So the students came together and asked “How can we make student interactions between lab to lab , and from student to admin better?” This question is important because our school is filled with 16 different districts around Columbus. Different backgrounds , different religions , and different people. To collect our data we did a survey and sent it to all of our junior and senior labs. With our data we collected that not all of us are as different as we assumed. 57.1% of our student body understand what focus Fridays are here to achieve based off of our pie charts but with our written responses show the true feelings of our students. Many students do enjoy our focus Fridays where other students are overwhelmed and feel like it’s a waste of time. Some findings we saw was that our class was back and forth on this topic of focus friday.

Eastland Career Center

RESEARCH QUESTION:

What do students and teachers know and feel about student engagement in extracurricular activities?

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

90% of students in our school are unaware of all the clubs we have to offer. We want to know how our teachers and students feel about the engagement at our school because there is a lack of student connection and students being actively involved in clubs. Student engagement in extracurriculars has been proven to create positive student behavior, increase self-esteem, and produce social support systems. We used surveys to collect our data and got over 500 responses on our student survey and 55 on our survey to the teachers. This data helped lead us to find that only 10% of the student body recognizes how many extracurriculars we have and 28.3% do not participate in extracurriculars. Also, 55% of teachers do not believe our students are involved and 89% of our teachers believe that involvement in extracurricular activities affects behavior in the classroom. Our goal is to bring awareness to all clubs we offer students and to increase our student connection. This will then increase our attendance rates and ultimately our graduation rates.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

After a year of fights and disruptions in our education, we realized that students in our high school were not okay. We surveyed our student body: “How has school affected your mental health?” “Is your mental health important to you?” “Where do you feel the most stressed?” We had over 700 responses to our survey. The information was staggering. Our administrator paired us with another small group of students who were working on a similar project, and our combined efforts brought to fruition “Wellness Week,” the first week in May. This week is a pilot as we plan wellness initiatives for next school year. We presented our research and solutions to our CWHS Staff SEL team. We are collaborating on creating a sensory room and hygiene bags for students in need of either as well. We are excited about this work and look forward to continuing it next year.