International Portal of Teacher Education
The online resource of academic content on teacher training and teacher education
Section archive - Research Methods
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284 items
41
In this article, the authors examine a rubric used to assess students’ writing in a large-scale testing program. They present empirical evidence for the existence of a potentially widespread threat to the validity of rubric assessments that arose due to design features. The research casts doubt on whether rubrics with structurally aligned categories can validly assess complex skills.
Published: 2014
Updated: Feb. 10, 2015
42
The purpose of this article is to assess the level of argument and content of student teachers’ reflective writings over the course of two semesters. The results showed that the mean argument levels of students’ reflective essays differed between the two consecutive semesters. The results indicated that it is important to encourage students to focus on the content of the justification, dialogue and transformative learning in their reflective essays.
Published: 2014
Updated: Jan. 20, 2015
43
This article explores the ethical dimensions of what Cochran-Smith and Lytle have termed the dialectic of practitioner inquiry. The article argues that the reflexive nature of the theory/practice dynamic means that, in the context of sustained practitioner inquiry, the ethics of research and the ethics of practice both hold the potential to be shaped by and to shape the other. Elsewhere in discussions of the issue of quality in practitioner and other practice-based research, Groundwater-Smith and Mockler have argued that ethical professionalism can and does work as a platform for quality, pushing practitioner inquiry ‘beyond celebration’.
Published: 2014
Updated: Nov. 24, 2014
44
In this study, the authors explore educators’ experiences in a research design that adheres to collaboration with educators; in this case in a year-long formative intervention in the context of teacher education. This analysis revealed three main contrasts, all of which the teacher educators experience as being consequential for their participation in the research. The first reflection related to how the teacher educators perceived their own position. The educators describe this position as one of agency and ownership, coupled with recognition of their expertise. Secondly, the position of the researcher was experienced as one that explicitly involves learning. Lastly, the research was experienced as being integrated.
Published: 2013
Updated: Sep. 30, 2014
45
This article will describe two of the author's personal stories to try to explore the secret or opaque space between the original telling and retelling of stories in narrative inquiry. Based upon her difficult struggles with the two stories of tea, school, and narrative, the author suggests that narrative inquiry has to be a complex loop of relationship, reflexivity, responsibility, and recursion.
Published: 2014
Updated: Sep. 17, 2014
46
This article presents an extended perspective based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s concepts of abduction, deduction and induction. The author intends to show some of the integral relationships between these concepts which can be relevant for interpretative case studies exemplified by classroom research.
Published: 2014
Updated: Aug. 24, 2014
47
The authors argue that a popular explanation for the inequality in the access to the nation’s most selective colleges is that low-income students undermatch by attending less selective colleges when their credentials predict admission to more highly selective colleges. They identify three problematic assumptions in research on undermatching.
Published: 2014
Updated: Aug. 07, 2014
48
In this article, the author argues that there is a considerable degree of similarity between research in the hard sciences and education and that this provides a useful lens for thinking about what constitutes “rigorous” and “scientific” education research. He suggests that the fundamental property of hard science research is its predictive power, a property that can equally be applied to large- and small-scale and quantitative and qualitative research in education.
Published: 2014
Updated: Jul. 23, 2014
49
This article argues that physical scientists are attempting to advance knowledge in the so-called hard sciences, whereas education researchers are laboring to increase knowledge and understanding in an “extremely hard” but softer domain. The author suggests that given the highly contextualized nature of educational processes, embedded in shifting complex social settings, and the relevance of all variables, very little education research is able to pursue predictive power.
Published: 2014
Updated: Jul. 23, 2014
50
In this article, the authors focused on findings from qualitative research on the effects of action research by reporting two linked quantitative studies. The authors' first goal was to triangulate the findings from their quantitative inquiry with the results from qualitative studies in order to increase the generalizability of claims previously reported. Their second goal was to identify potential moderators of action research impact on teachers. The contribution of these two studies to the corpus of action research literature is twofold. First, the authors confirmed two important benefits of action research participation reported by qualitative researchers, improved teacher attitudes to educational research and increased self-efficacy. Second, they found moderators of the impact of action research that help identify conditions in which action research is particularly likely to benefit teachers.
Published: 2012
Updated: Apr. 29, 2014