Final Thoughts On Session 4 - Data Collection In Class & First Attempt At Using SPSS

The second part of today's lecture was simply awesome - because my group members worked together cohesively and devised some time saving strategies to complete the tasks assigned to us. First of all, when we received the template given to us, all the five of us quickly designated certain categories among ourselves and made the changes accordingly after keying in our survey results. I was surprised that my group members and I were very engaged indeed throughout the process of putting together everything and sharing with the rest of the class. I felt that there was truly cooperation and learning among my coursemates, and there were some coursemates who were ready to lend a helping hand to others who were having difficulties. I remember that at the beginning stage, there was some confusion over the customisation of the template but soon, that was quite quickly resolved and everyone got down to do their part. Very soon, my group was ready to combine the results using the spreadsheet in Google and then exporting it to Excel. When we finally compelled all the raw data, we were rather eager to transfer them to SPSS.

It was during this time that we discovered a special function - 'Transpose', which allowed us to convert horizontal rows to vertical rows in Excel, and by doing so, this enabled us to cut and paste the information from Excel to SPSS directly, as the rows in SPSS are arranged vertically, unlike the ones in Excel. We were truly elated when we were able to do that and we calculated the figures by following the steps Dr Quek showed us earlier. However, it turned out that there seemed to be some 'errors' in the results generated, but some figures were shown though, and probably, the 'errors' shown were due to the fact that we didn't have the minimum sample size of 30 respondents. Anyway, our data is subjected to change as some of our coursemates are coming back and we can compute their inputs by then. This lesson was really a fruitful learning experience as I was made aware of the procedure that I will have to follow if I were to carry out action research next time.