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AM-ME: Research Group Meetings for Plan

ResourceJul 25, 2025
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This page contains the meeting materials for the plan stage of the AM-ME (adapted measure of math engagement) project. The essence of the plan stage is collaboratively designing the research, from forming research questions to deciding on data collection methods and protocols. Our intention for the plan stage was for the research team and Research Group members to collaboratively design and prepare for all research activities. Unfortunately, due to the timing of finalizing the grant, completing contracts with the school district, and recruiting Research Group members, the research team led the first wave of data collection in Spring 2023 without Research Group member support. Working with our school district partner included needing to time our data collection to work with their academic and testing calendars, which meant we would lose a year of data collection if we waited for Research Group members to be onboarded. This was a decision the research team did not make lightly.  

 During the plan stage, the research team and Research Group members worked together to create the initial AM-ME survey, to prepare for and lead cognitive interviews to gather feedback on the survey from students and teachers, fine-tune the final survey items, and plan for survey administration. You’ll notice that in some of these meetings we spent a majority of the time, but not all the time, focused on plan stage activities. There are always a lot of moving pieces on any research project, and in a Collaborative project where we aim to have the Research Group involved in as many aspects of the research as possible, this is even more true.  

Even though the Research Group was involved in some way in the planning of all components of the research project, there was still a lot of work done behind the scenes. You can find resources related to designing research with community and preparing data collection structures in the resource library. They go alongside the meeting materials summarized on this page.  

Helpful Tips

  • Prep time for meetings in the plan stage starts to increase as you need to determine the goals for your meetings and then create activities that will help you reach them. 
  • When starting to create agendas and activities for meetings in the plan stage, it’s important to reflect on what went well or what didn’t go so well in past meetings and past activities. This way you can adapt and do more of what works or try new activities to reach your goals. 
  • Making observations about things like how long a meeting can be before community members lose focus or aren’t able to work as well, how long they are comfortable spending on one activity, whether they do better with large or small group activities, and when/if taking a break is useful will help you build a successful meeting. You’ll notice we always have breaks, keep meetings to two hours or less, and create activities that involve moving around the room and working in small groups when we are in person. This is based on what we’ve observed works well for this Research Group.  

Creating the initial AM-ME (August 2023)

This meeting focused on creating a definition of math engagement, learning about survey design and beginning to select questions we wanted to include in our initial AM-ME, and began talking about gather student and teacher input on the initial AM-ME. 

Note: This meeting builds on the previous meeting, which is categorized in the partner stage, that had Research Group members making meaning of the results of focus groups. Research Group members were asked to do pre-work before coming to this meeting, which consisted of completing a survey asking questions about the themes agreed upon in the last meeting. 

Meeting length: 2 hours  

Gathering feedback small group sessions 1-3 (September and October 2023)

In Fall 2023, we asked Research Group members if they would like to join small groups focusing on specific activities, one of which was planning feedback sessions (cognitive interviews) with teachers and students to improve our survey items. This small group met three times over the course of two months to prepare for feedback sessions. Members of this small group received training in human subjects research. 

Meeting length: 1 hour each  

Session 1 

Session 2 

Session 3 

Note: Session 3 is categorized as both “implement” and “plan” due to the fact that small group members who were interested in leading feedback sessions were given a research ethics training and practiced following a feedback session script. However, for greater clarity of the scope of this small group, we’ve kept all the Gathering Feedback Small Group sessions together in the plan stage. 

Sharing results of feedback sessions: Drop-in meetings (November 2023) 

After completing feedback sessions (cognitive interviews) with students and teachers, we hosted drop-in meetings to share results with Research Group members. Drop-in meetings were scheduled at two different times and Research Group members chose one to attend. In this session we also shared how we decided to change survey items based on the results of feedback sessions and asked them for additional input on survey items we still weren’t sure about.  

Meeting length: 1 hour 

Fine-tuning survey items (September 2024) 

This meeting focused on multiple rounds of an activity to refine survey items and help us improve the AM-ME survey to be administered in February 2025.  

Meeting length: 2 hours  

Planning final round of survey administration: Drop-in meetings (January 2025) 

This was a drop-in style meeting (where we provided two virtual, one hour time options) to plan for our final survey administration of the project. We focused on generating ideas that would help us achieve a high response rate, including where and when the survey should be administered in each school.  

Meeting length: 1 hour  

The Adapted Measure of Math Engagement Research Group includes six students (Antonio Chavira, Brianna Espy, Ryan Ombongi, Serrah Ssemukutu, Salma Ahmed, and Diamond Tony-Uduhirinwa), five teachers (Nathan W. Earley, Karina Mazurek, Kathleen Morgan, Karla Rokke, and Ashly Tritch), and five researchers (Marisa Crowder, Samantha E. Holquist, Diane (Ta-Yang) Hsieh, Claire Kelley, and Mark Vincent B. Yu). Researchers Alyssa Scott, Olivia Reyes, and Avalloy McCarthy also extensively contributed to this work. Bloomington Public School District leaders Betsy Hawes, Marcie Coval, Julio Caesar, and Rik Lamm provided support to this work. Jennifer Widstrand served as the project manager.  

If you have questions about the Adapted Measures of Math Engagement project, please contact Principal Investigator Samatha E. Holquist at sholquist@childtrends.org.

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, grant #2200437. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.