Using Analytical Frameworks for Classroom Research

Collecting Data and Analysing Narrative

Susan Rodrigues, Susan Rodrigues

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135161040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This introductory collection brings together contributions from a range of international researchers, each working within their own traditions, to explore current perspectives on the use of analytical approaches in education. Providing a close examination of cutting-edge data analysis techniques, each contribution describes a set of tools to assist prospective researchers as they decide which analytical approach or approaches best suit their own research endeavours.

Exploring theoretical approaches from both a macro and a micro perspective, each chapter:

• Outlines the theoretical assumptions of the approach

• 
  
  

• Highlights the constraints and tensions within the approach

• 
  
  

• Contextualises the tradition in which the approach is located

• 
  
  

• Provides data and case studies to illustrate how the approach is used in classroom research and the realities of practice

• 
  
  

In the final chapter a cross-comparison between the approaches covered is presented, allowing researchers to better understand which approach is most suitable for their project.

Essential reading for all those interested in the theory behind the analytical approach, this book will appeal to all postgraduates, researchers, and academics engaged in research in educational settings.

Chapter 1
Understanding educational achievement and outcomes

Person, process and context

Mary Ainley and Sarah Buckley

Introduction

Finding answers to educational problems is a complex undertaking. Whether awareness of the problem arises as a result of classroom observation, the reading of learned journals or armchair theorising, there is always a range of perspectives that can be brought to bear on a problem. In this chapter, we explore a number of models and analytic approaches that can be applied to investigate specific issues that are part of the complex mix of person, process and context that feature in education at all levels.

In the first part of this chapter, we take the basic components of person, process and context as described by a prominent theorist in developmental psychology and examine how they can be used to describe the basic components in a wide range of educational research. In the second part of this chapter, we describe some of the quantitative analysis tools used in educational research and show how different types of analyses pose different basic questions; questions about how variables operate and questions concerning combinations of variables, identified as personal profiles or as developmental trajectories. Using a variety of educational research examples, we intend to demonstrate that these are complementary approaches; each approach provides a slightly different lens on the educational issue driving the research. The approaches we describe are not limited to educational research but represent perspectives that are currently being applied to find answers to a wide range of behavioural questions.

A model of person, process and context

Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological theory of development, which in later formulations becomes a bioecological model (Bronfenbrenner, 2001), has had a major influence on modern developmental and educational psychological thought. One way these models have influenced thinking is through the conceptualisation of a child’s developmental contexts as a multilayered system. At the core are the microsystem processes in which the child is actor. Surrounding layers consist of more indirect, but no less important, influences on the child’s development. The relationship between the home and the school manifests itself in issues such as: attitudes and expectations concerning homework; the influence of parental employment arrangements on family life; and the overarching cultural norms and community legal system providing both affordances and constraints on family interactions. Although not the only theorist to draw attention to this complex network of interacting systems, many of the insights from Bronfenbrenner’s perspectives on research into children’s development provide useful ways of looking at research into children’s educational achievement and development.

Awareness of the multiple layers and interacting systems flows through to consideration of the different components or levels of analysis that are adopted in research designs. Bronfenbrenner (1986) outlines a useful way to understand the structure of specific research investigations. He describes three analytic models or paradigms, which he refers to as: a ‘social address model’; a ‘process-context model’; and a ‘person-process-context model’. Each model provides a general schema for conceptualising the elements of a research question or a research design. At the same time, the specific questions, which can be addressed within these general paradigms, offer a wide range of possibilities for investigating and understanding aspects of the education process. One of the examples cited in Bronfenbrenner’s paper demonstrates the differences between these three models. The example is from the developmental literature and concerns early attachment processes between infant and mother. This is not unrelated to a number of questions considered in the early childhood education literature where it has been shown that early secure attachment status is predictive of children’s early school adjustment. A study by Crockenberg (1981) reported that in a sample of middle-class and working-class mothers the level of social support the mothers received from their social network at the time their infants were approximately three months old was a significant predictor of the mother–infant attachment relationship at 12 months of age. There are a number of contextual factors operating here, including the social address defined as social class membership (i.e. middle-class and working-class families) and the mother’s membership of a social network.

At the process level, the study has identified the significance of specificinteractive processes within the social network, namely, social support defined as help and support from ‘husband, extended family, other children, friends and neighbours, and professionals … an assessment of the affective and material assistance experienced by the mother in her mother role, relative to the stresses experienced by her’ (Crockenberg, 1981: 859). The outcome variable is also a process variable in that attachment status defines a particular pattern of interactive behaviour between mother and infant. However, it was also found that the beneficial effects of social support processes were related to the infant’s temperament (a person variable). The strongest effects of social support processes occurred for mothers and infants where the infant was identified as having an ‘irritable’ temperament, while effects were described as minimal for infants with a ‘calm’ temperament. In this investigation the child behaviour of interest (attachment status at 12 months) was predicted by a network of interacting variables that included input from the broader social network, the patterns of interaction between the mother and her three-month-old infant and the temperamental style of the infant.

As Bronfenbrenner suggests, consideration of all three components – social address (context), process and person – acknowledges the complexity of factors associated with developmental outcomes for children.

The position taken in this chapter is that this framework for understanding the structure of research questions and designs offers one very rich way of understanding the various models that underpin research questions and investigations. In the next section we examine how social address (context), process and person components feature in current educational research.

The social address or context model

The social address or context model perspective is adopted in many of the reports that emerge from large-scale national and international surveys. The students’ country becomes the social address, and variable and systematic differences in observed educational outcomes are linked back to features of the educational experience or the socio-political system. Many of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reports are of this type. For example, profiles of students’ achievement in different areas of science, attitudes towards science, engagement and interest in science and intentions for future participation in science are reported according to students’ home country. Different social arrangements for schooling, such as levels of public and private participation in the funding and the management of schools, have been analysed in relation to students’ performance in science (see OECD, 2007).

Social address can also be conceptualised at a number of finer-grain contextual levels where comparisons are made, for example, between experience and outcomes for students from rural and urban schools or between schools or students distinguished on the basis of indices of socio-economic advantage and disadvantage.

Researchers from the Longitudinal Studies of Australian Youth (LSAY) have adopted a social address model for their investigation of patterns of movement of young people on completion of high school (Hillman and Rothman, 2007). The dominant pattern of migration from non-metropolitan areas to the cities was related to study plans. The most common reason for movement was to participate in some form of post-compulsory education – in the majority of cases this was to embark on university education. Geographic location was found to be a strong factor in the educational development trajectory for non-metropolitan students. Their progression to tertiary education was highly likely to be associated with the broader change of leaving home and assuming more independence than was necessary for urban students who go on to pursue tertiary education.

Analysis of the influence of the social address factor of socio-economic status is another of the social address perspectives that features in reports from PISA. Results across all countries participating in PISA confirm the well-documented pattern of students from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds gaining significantly higher scores on measures of science literacy than students from less advantaged backgrounds (see OECD, 2007: 183). It is of interest here to consider the nature of the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status. The index was constructed by combining information provided by students about their father’s and mother’s occupations (scaled to reflect status) and level of education, with an index of home possessions including family wealth (e.g. whether students had a room of their own, internet access, etc.), access to educational resources (e.g. a quiet place to study, books to help with their schoolwork, etc.) and cultural possessions. The specific indicators are assumed to represent family environment resources, activities and patterns of interaction that are related to school achievement. Development of the index is referenced to studies of vocabulary development in early childhood, relations between early patterns of school achievement and parental economic and occupational circumstances and levels of involvement in extra activities both in school and out of school (see OECD, 2007: 181).

Other research programmes have investigated how achievement is influenced by students being grouped within schools on the basis of specific ability, referred to in some contexts as ‘tracking’, ‘ability-grouping’ or ‘streaming’. A wealth of studies demonstrate what Marsh (1987) terms the ‘big-fish-little-pond effect’, wherein an average student placed in a high-ability class will have a poorer self-concept, and lower self-confidence, than an average student placed in a class with students of varying ability (see Marsh et al., 2008). The greater diversity offered to students in classes with mixed abilities can have other implications for academic development, for instance, in terms of the types of peer interactions that are encouraged.

The social address perspective may take the form of identifying various forms of peer networks and then considering how membership of these networks impacts on educational experiences and outcomes. Over the last decade there have been considerable advances in techniques for investigating and analysing peer relationships. In this stimulating new research, the influence of students’ social address is examined by focusing on their position in peer networks. A range of different networks can be investigated and take into account the role of different interactions that operate both through formal school contexts as well as informal school contexts. Rather than referring to a global influence of peers, contemporary social network techniques allow the identification of students’ positions in multiple networks, such as friendships and help-seeking. Networks are examined by asking students questions like ‘Who are your friends at school?’ and ‘Who do you go to if you need help with your schoolwork?’

The structure of these networks can be described in terms of their patterns and density. For example, some networks consist of lots of ‘dyads’ (two-person relations), while others might be more clustered or operate via numerous interconnected ‘triads’ (three-person relations). Different structures have different implications for the types of cultures operating in the classroom/school. This approach has recently been applied in a research investigation into peer network influences on mathematical anxiety (Buckley, 2009). Buckley examined the structure of help-seeking networks in mathematics classes and found that interactions were more likely to be dyadic, rather than clustered, at a school that employed ability grouping for mathematics classes. This means that in the classes where students had been grouped by ability, help-seeking interactions tended to occur between two persons. In contrast, for another school where students were placed in classes of mixed ability, help-seeking tended to be more clustered and structurally similar to the types of interactions characteristic of typical social relationships (i.e. friendships). Thus, the increased homogeneity in classrooms grouped on ability level may have had unintended implications for the informal peer culture related to academic help-seeking.

The process-context model

The second perspective described by Bronfenbrenner (1986) is the process-context model. Here emphasis is placed on processes that are aligned with social group membership that, in turn, account for the relation between social address and the educational outcome of interest. There is a growing body of research, especially in the educational psychology literature, exploring the processes that intervene between factors readily identified as contextual (social address) factors and educational outcomes. A couple of examples from LSAY are described to illustrate this pattern.

One of the important schooling processes evaluated as part of the LSAY research is student engagement, which is defined in terms of students’ participation in the life of the school (Fullarton, 2002). Fullarton argues that students’ sense of belonging and identification with their school could be indexed through their participation in the range of extra-curricular activities their school offers. Social address and process come together in many of the findings reported (for example, the highest levels of engagement with school were found in students from higher socio-economic backgrounds).

Students who were selected into the LSAY samples as 15-year-olds in 1995 and 1998 were followed up after two years (in 1997 and 2000 respectively) to identify groups of early school leavers. Social address variables such as geographic location were included in the set of predictor variables. While there were significant regional difference...