Overlaying your responses with additional specs

Take a topic that you would like to study, and, using the four combinations of knowledge claims, strategies of inquiry,and methods in Figure 1.2, discuss how the topic might be studied using each of the combinations.

[Some of] Our Research Questions:

- What common stasis points (stopping points or points of critical tension) do students identify when they reflect on their learning process in the weekly CIQ (a formative assessment tool)?

- Upon recognizing and naming these patterns, how can instructors use them to clarify and improve “critically reflective” learning?

Quantitative Research:
We could set up an experiment in which we had a very tightly controlled task (I'm thinking of something like having all of the students do a basic rhetorical analysis of a common text). In one class we would use the CIQ throughout the process of teaching and helping the students complete the tightly controlled task. The other class would be the control group and the teacher would have to be different because she might bring in her knowledge from the other group's CIQs. Then, we would compare both the process and the outcome differences. Perhaps this experiment might involve video taping the classes for that small segment of the course, as well.


So our operating hypotheses for the above scenario include:
- Students using the CIQ will discuss their learning process about the tightly controlled task (e.g., the rhetorical analysis) in their CIQs.
- Students will experience stasis points.
- Upon examining the data (i.e., the CIQs) the instructor will be able to identify some patterns and/or addressable insights regarding the students' learning processes.
- Instructors employing the CIQ-analysis method described above will in some way be able to guide her students through the task more effectively.
- Evidence of this effectiveness will be found in the quality of the completed task (e.g., the rhetorical analysis).
- Evidence of improvements in self-conscious/critically reflective approaches to the task will be found somewhere also? (Perhaps in an additional artifact requested of both classes?)

Qualitative research:
What we're planning to do: continuing collecting the CIQs weekly, use grounded theory to try to develop categories for the types of reflection we see emerging in both teacher and student responses. Develop a theory of the range of responses possible and think about potential methods for moving students and teachers deeper into reflective practice.


Here's how we've explained our grounded theory so far:

The "theory" we are seeking might be better described as a "vocabulary"; i.e., we're trying to establish a precise set of terms that describe the moves students make (and see themselves making) as learners. Beyond the emergent categories, we will refine our understandings of the differences between reflection and critical reflection.

Cresswell combines constructivist knowledge claims with ethnography and discusses this approach in terms of "identifying a culture-sharing group and studying how it developed shared patterns of behavior over time" (21), which reminds me to pause and perhaps consider how we're identifying the "shared culture" of our participants. These are undergraduate writing students . . . what other qualities constitute their "shared culture"? And for the purposes of our study, what attributes are most important? For example, I'll go out on a limb, here, and assume that your students, like mine, are mostly Caucasian. But our study isn't about "Caucasian learning styles" or some such. (I really don't want to get all "Bell-Curvey" here--egads! So I'm wondering whether we're proposing that our students' presence in our undergraduate writing classes constitutes a "shared culture." I suppose this is what nearly all qualitative composition pedagogy studies assume. So maybe this questioning isn't overly important. Nonetheless, since we're deadline in some respects with cognition and problem-solving I'm tempted to at least pause before confidently asserting that traceable patterns among our undergraduate writing students are representative of patterns to be found among those in classes elsewhere.

Next, Cresswell combines participatory knowledge claims with narrative design and open-ended interviewing. Participatory knowledge claims is closest to our approach. Cresswell's example (it's weirdly formatted as a summary of all those approaches) regards studying oppression. I'm unable to extract any new, interesting nuggets at this point. I'm uninterested in explicating "oppression" in our use of CIQs. I get it. Don't feel like going there would be productiive right now.



Mixed Methods:
I suspect a sequential method might be best for us. Once we get through the qualitative stage and have some categories, we might be able to set up an experiment testing the methods we've developed for developing student-teacher reflection. This makes sense to me, too, in the sense that grounded theory doesn't seem like a good fit for a concurrent qualitative study, in which, presumably, you'd have to really know what you were looking for.

Transformative procedures might have been a possibility if we were planning on applying a particular theory from the beginning; for instance, if we had decided to do a positionality study, we might have been able to take a single theory and do both a qualitative and quantitative approach.

Yes, returning to our questions:

- What common stasis points (stopping points or points of critical tension) do students identify when they reflect on their learning process in the weekly CIQ (a formative assessment tool)?

- Upon recognizing and naming these patterns, how can instructors use them to clarify and improve “critically reflective” learning?

. . . we're ultimately seeking a way to generalize our results to a larger population of students and teachers. The terminology itself (whatever categories we're able to identify) will be less important than the circumstances each term describes, and then the instructor's ability to name it and engage it with her students.