Strategies for Educational Inquiry

Week 6: Descriptive, Correlational, Causal-Comparative Designs & Qualitative Approaches - February 15

Announcement

Tentative Outline for Saturday:

  • Review:

    • Reliability and Validity
    • Construction of cognitive domain instruments
    • Sampling
    • Internal & External Validity

  • Experimental Designs
  • Other Designs
    • Quasi-experimental
    • Pre-experimental
    • Correlational
    • Ex-Post-Facto
  • Qualitative Approaches

Tentative Outline for Sunday:

  • Presentation of Critiques

    • Mindy
    • Casey
    • Bruce

  • Rosenthal & Saddlemier (if time permits)

  1. Textbook Readings

    • Johnson & Christensen, Chapter 11

    • Johnson & Christensen, Chapter 12

  2. Textbook Lectures

  3. Pre-experimental Descriptive Designs

  4. How to Improve Pre-experimental Descriptive Designs

  5. Correlation and Correlational Designs

  6. Ex-Post-Facto, aka, Causal-Comparative Designs

  7. Qualitative Approaches: Introduction

    Introduction

    This week introduces on particular type of descriptive design: qualitative.

    As I reviewed educational research textbooks before choosing one for Y520, I noticed that almost all seemed to treat "qualitative" and "ethnography" as synonyms. The other established traditions of qualitative inquiry, and their accompanying methods, seemed to be almost universally ignored by most textbook authors. (The few textbooks that included a wider array of qualitative methods had other serious shortcomings -- such as superficial discussion of quantitative methods). Later, I stumbled upon articles written by well-established qualitative reseachers, such as Frederick Erickson, George Spindler and Robin Fox, that confirmed my suspicions. For example, Wolcott (1987, p. 43) states "It has been dismaying in recent years to watch educational researchers affix the label "ethnography" to virtually any endeavor at descriptive research."

    Never mentioned in textbooks is another problem of which we should be aware. Again, I let Wolcott (1987, p. 51) state the problem:

    That raises another of the issues that make school ethnography so difficult and even so unlikely [emphasis added]. The people interested in doing it are, for the most part, individuals who have invested virtually their entire lives in school, first as students, then as students of the teaching process, and finally as professional educators. Being so totally immersed in and committed to formal education, they are as likely to "discover" school culture as Kluckhohn’s proverbial fish are likely to discover water. The cross-cultural and comparative basis that helps ethnographers identify something they are tentatively willing to describe as culture in someone else’s behavior -- because it is readily distinguishable from their own -- is lacking. These hopelessly enculturated insiders accept as natural and proper the very things an ethnographer from another society -- or even an ethnographer from our own society not so totally familiar with schools -- might want to question.

    Later, Wolcott suggests the familiarity of educators may be offset somewhat, but never completely, by their insider status.

    The readings for this unit draw your attention to other traditions of qualitative inquiry, including ethology, ecological psychology, holistic ethnography, cognitive anthropology, symbolic interaction, biographical studies, phenomenology, and grounded theory. The Jacob (1988) article discusses several of these approaches in more detail. Steiner (1986) explicates phenomenology. Spindler (1992) discusses the characteristics of ethnography in general, and Wolcott (1987) provides an in-depth discussion. Erickson (1984) provides an excellent introduction to ethnography in the schools and includes several practical suggestions. Fox (1996) lived through many of the challenges to science that he discusses. Note in particular paragraph 43, in which Fox maintains that interpretive approaches "... have been hijacked by ideologically motivated, blatantly political movements of the anti-Vietnam baby-boom generation."

  8. Qualitative Approaches: Readings