1. Learner-centered environments
(1) Including teaching practices that have been called “culturally responsive,” “culturally appropriate,” “culturally compatible,” and “culturally relevant.” (Ladson-Billings, 1995)
(2) Fits the concept of “diagnostic teaching” (Bell et al., 1980)
(3) Teachers are aware that learners construct their own meanings, beginning with the belief, understandings, and cultural practices they bring to the classroom.
2. Knowledge-centered environments
(1) Taking seriously the need to help students become knowledgeable (Bruner, 1981) by learning in ways that lead to understanding and subsequent transfer.
(2) Using “progressive formalization” to develop curricula that support learning with understanding and encourage sense making
(3) Another alternative to a “rutted path” curriculum is one of “learning the landscape” (Greeno, 1991). Here learning is analogous to learning to live in an environment: learning your way around, learning what resources are available, and learning how to use those resources in conducting your activities productively and enjoyably (Greeno, 1991:175)
(4) Ideas are best introduced when students see a need or a reason for their use—this helps them see relevant uses of knowledge to make sense of what they are learning. (P.139)
(5) A challenge for the design of knowledge-centered environments is to strike the appropriate balance between activities designed to promote understanding and those designed to promote the automaticity of skills necessary to function effectively without being overwhelmed by attentional requirements (P.139).
3. Assessment-centered environments
(1) The key principles of assessment are that they should provide opportunities for feedback and revision and that what is assessed must be congruent with one’s learning goals.
(2) Formative assessment involves the use of assessments (usually administered in the context of the classroom) as sources of feedback to improve teaching and learning; summative assessment measures what students have learned at the end of some set of learning activities (P.140).
(3) Feedback is most valuable when students have the opportunities to use it to revise their thinking as they are working on a unit or project (P.141).
4. Community-centered environments
(1) A key environment for learning is the family. Even when family members do not focus on instructional roles, they provide resources for children’s learning, activities in which learning occurs, and connections to community (Moll,
5. Television provides images and role models that can affect how children view themselves, how they see others, attitudes about what academic subjects they should be interested in, and other topics related to person perception. The image can have both positive and negative effect (P.150).
6. Children can also misinterpret programs about people form different cultures, depending on what they already know (Newcomb and Collins, 1979). Stereotyping represents a powerful effect of watching television that is potentially negative (P.151). Experimental studies indicate that such stereotyping effects decrease with children as young as 5 if adults offer critiques of the stereotypic portrayals as the children watch programs (Dorr, 1982).
7. A focus on the degree to which environments are learner centered is consistent with the strong body of evidence suggesting that learners’ use their current knowledge to construct new knowledge and that what they know and believe at the moment affects how they interpret new information (P.153).
1. Methods: the techniques or procedures used to gather and analyze data related to some research question or hypothesis (e.g., questionnaire, observation, interview, measurement and scaling, sampling, case study, statistical analysis…)
2. Methodology: the strategy, plan of action, process or design lying behind the choice and use of particular methods and linking the choice and use of methods to the desired outcomes (e.g., survey research, experimental research, ethnography, grounded theory, action research, phenomenological research, discourse analysis)
3. Theoretical perspective: the philosophical stance informing the methodology and thus providing a context for the process and grounding its logic and criteria (e.g., positivism/post-positivism; interpretivism such as symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics; feminism; critical inquiry; postmodernism)
4. Epistemology: the theory of knowledge embedded in the theoretical perspective and thereby in the methodology (e.g., Objectivism, Constructionism, Subjectivism)
1. Borg and Gall (1989) name the two approaches (i.e. qualitative and quantitative) positivistic and naturalistic, comparing them on the dimensions of the vision of the nature of reality, the relationship of the researcher to the research subject, issues of generalizability, discussion of causality, and the role of values (P.1046).
2. Early research efforts often used qualitative methods to evaluate and describe the use of media in the classroom (P.1047).
3. Although not researchers per se, instructional systems designers have always used the qualitative methods of surveys, interviews, and observations during the front-end analysis and evaluation phases of development. […] Driscoll (1995) suggests that educational technologists select research paradigms based on what they perceive as the most critical questions. […..] Many teachers, trainers, administrators, managers, community members, and instructional leaders contend that the evolution of new technologies will continue to change the nature of teaching, training, instruction, and learning (Ambron & Hooper, 1990, 1998; Lambert & Sallis, 1987; Schwartz, 1987; Schwier, 1987; U.S. Congress, OTA, 1988). (P.1048)
4. Qualitative Research Methods:
(1) Grounded theory
(2) Participants Observation
(3) Nonparticipant observation
(4) Interviews—Goetz and LeCompte (1984) describe three techniques for structured interviews: confirmation instruments, participant-construct instrument, and projective devices (P.1057).
¨ Confirmation instruments verify the applicability of data gathered from key-informant interviews or observations across segments of the population being studied.
¨ Participant-construct instruments may be used to measure degrees of feelings that individuals have about phenomena or in having them classify events, situations techniques, or concepts from their perspectives.
¨ Projective devices such as photographs, drawings, other visuals, or other objects may be used to elicit individuals’ opinions or feelings, helping researchers clarify what is going on in the situation.
(5) Documents and artifacts analysis (P.1058)
¨ Goetz and LeCompte (1984, P.155) provide guidelines for artifact collection, identifying for activities in this type of method: locating artifacts, identifying the material, analyzing it, and evaluating it. They recommend that the more informed the researcher is about the subjects and setting, the more useful artifacts may be identified and the more easily access may be gained to those artifacts.
¨ The meaning of artifacts is often intensely personal and subjective, so that verification of findings through triangulation is recommended.
5. Overall approaches to analyze qualitative data—based on the philosophical approach underlying the study (P.1059). Miles and Huberman (1994) outline three overall approaches to analyzing qualitative data:
¨ An “interpretive” approach would be phenoniological in nature or based on social interactionism.
¨ A “collaborative social research” is often used by action researchers in partnership composed of members of many, and sometimes opposing, organizations.
¨ “Social anthropology” relies primarily on ethnography, providing detailed and rich descriptions across multiple data resources. Goetz and LeCompte (1994) call this “recursive approach.”
6. Miles and Huberman (1994, P.10) state that qualitative data analysis consists of “three concurrent flows of activity: data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing/verification.”
7. Researchers may derive patterns in ways Goetz and LeCompte call “analytical induction (P.179),” reviewing data for categories of phenomena, defining sets of relationships, developing hypothesis, collecting more data, and refining hypotheses accordingly. Those using a grounded-theory approach may employ “constant comparison.” […..] Field notes consist of observations and the researcher’s interpretations. Bogdan and Biklen (1984) call former content “the descriptive part (P.108)” and the latter “the reflective part (P.121).”
8. Coding data (P.1060):
(1) Miles and Huberman (1994) suggest that data can be coded descriptively or interpretively.
(2) Bogdan and Biklen (1992) recommend reading data over at least several times to begin to develop a coding scheme.
(3) Goetz and LeCompte describe coding to form a taxonomic analysis, a sort of outline of what is related to what, and in what ways.
9. Criteria for evaluating qualitative studies (P.1063)—validity can be created in three ways:
(1) multiple observers in teams can cross-check data and patterns continually
(2) the researcher can refine and test propositions and hypotheses throughout the study, in a grounded-theory approach
(3) the researcher can write using “verisimilitude” or “vraisemblance” (P.383), or writing that makes the world of the subjects real to the reader; the reader recognizes the authenticity of the results. (member check)
10. Lincoln and Guba (1985) agree with others that conventional criteria are inappropriate for qualitative studies and that alternate criteria do exist: a) credibility; b) transferability; c) dependability; and d) confirmability. Erlandson et al (1993) describe the following techniques for ensuring the quality of a qualitative study (P.1064):
(1) prolonged engagement
(2) persistent observation
(3) triangulation
(4) referential adequacy
(5) peer debriefing
(6) member checking
(7) reflexive journal
(8) thick description
(9) purposive sampling
(10) audit trail
