eJournal Entry 25

June 11, 2025
Overwhelming feelings about data integration often signal the need for a more structured, step-by-step approach rather than attempting to tackle everything simultaneously

The Experience

Today I found myself confronting a wave of anxiety as the reality of the approaching second term of EDS199 weighs heavily on my mind. While I feel confident about Chapters 1-3 of my final paper, the prospect of writing Chapter 4 onwards feels overwhelming and unclear. Despite successfully completing my data collection phase with 38 survey responses and 6 student interviews, I'm now grappling with the complexity of processing and presenting findings from multiple data sources, and I realize I don't have a clear roadmap for how to approach the writing once my analysis is complete. The manual qualitative coding of my interviews feels manageable since I'm working through it systematically, and I'm grateful that my external adviser is guiding me through the survey data processing, but I still haven't developed a concrete plan for conducting the supplemental LMS review. Most confusing is figuring out how to effectively cross-reference and triangulate findings between my different methods, survey, interviews, and LMS analysis, in a way that creates a coherent narrative rather than three separate reports, and I'm beginning to think that creating comprehensive individual method reports might serve as helpful reference documents when I tackle the integrated Chapter 4 writing process.

Looking Forward

This moment of confusion is actually helping me recognize that I need to slow down and create a more structured approach to my analysis and writing process rather than rushing toward the final paper. Moving forward, I plan to complete the qualitative coding first as intended, then work with my adviser to finalize the survey analysis, and finally design the LMS review based on themes emerging from the other two methods, which should create a logical progression that informs each subsequent analysis. The idea of writing detailed method-specific reports as reference documents feels like a practical intermediate step that could reduce the overwhelming nature of Chapter 4 by breaking it into manageable components, and I'm reminding myself that feeling confused at this stage is normal for complex mixed-methods research rather than a sign of failure.