Section archive - Research Methods

This article discusses the research regarding the formation and role of networks, and factors to consider when assessing the impact and outcomes of a network. It also looks at the connections between networks and action research (AR), and moves to a focus on the Evaluative Study of Action Research (ESAR), currently in its first stages, and outlines four levels of networks associated with the study. Finally, this article provides an early formative analysis with regard to the impact and outcomes of the ESAR team as a network to date. The authors conclude that the ESAR network provides evidence of each factor of well-functioning networks. Formative evaluations will continue for how the team network functions, as well as how each of the networks that develop functions as the research is undertaken.

In this study, the authors examine the strategies reported by naïve assessment constructors. Naïve assessment constructors refer to those individuals with limited, if any, formal preparation for constructing classroom assessments. The authors identified 14 distinct strategies that coalesced into three families of strategies: Alignment, Item Evaluation, and Affective Evaluation. The authors suggest that teacher educators can guide learners to more appropriate strategies within each family and facilitate deliberate practice on their use.

Adopting the lens of “new histories” as the basis for the author's inquiry into the institutional legacy of the art program at Toronto’s Central Technical School (CTS), the author created a methodological framework informed by the traditional art form of the polyptych, in which many panels are joined together to show and tell multilayered stories connected to a central theme, to demonstrate visually how stories are interrelated, and to present openings to other stories. This article describes how the author came to see the polyptych as a methodological frame by unpacking its historic roots; by exploring how it operates in contemporary historical research; and by reflecting on how his identity as an artist, teacher, and researcher influences the way he organizes stories within this framework.

The current paper reports a self-study of multicultural identities in a public high school ethnic studies class and a university multicultural education course in Hawai‘i, a unique multicultural setting in which no ethnic group is in the majority. Three important findings emerged. First, a personal-constructivist-collaborative approach to self-study in an intellectually safe classroom environment provides both students and teachers with a context for challenging their socially constructed assumptions about race, culture, and ethnicity. The second major theme to come out of the data analysis describes how the students’ stories became transformational teaching texts. Third, self-study is a multicultural pedagogy that promotes social perspective taking, tolerance, and understanding of diversity through personal transformation.