Core Course Synthesis Flashcards
Lochmiller and Lester (2017)
Qualitative Research Features
Qualitative research involves the following:
- Definition: Qual focuses on the human experience in social settings and seeks to make sense of social practices
- Researcher as instrument, more subjective
- It focuses on behaviors in relation to an environment.
- It’s inductive, meaning it goes from specific to general
- It uses diverse data sources.
Miller and Murillo (2011)
The authors conducted a qualitative ethnographic study to better understand why students don’t seek help from libraries and to understand who they do seek help from.
METHODS: Semi-structured ethnographic interviews. Used photo artifacts.
PARTICIPANTS: 91 undergraduates of various majors at 3 midwestern universities
FINDINGS: The authors found that participants did not seek librarians help, and participants did not understand how librarians could help them. Ss preferred using professors, peers, and public libraries due to habit formation and proximity.
IMPLICATIONS: Library use should be integrated into school curricula. Schools should use peer mentors to reduce library anxiety and increase accessibility.
ARTIFACT USE: researchers showed participants pictures of their libraries. Participants could not explain what a circulation desk is or a reference desk
Horwitz et al (1986)
The authors conducted seminal research on second language anxiety.
Definition: They define language anxiety as a specific type of situational anxiety involving a complex of beliefs, emotions, and behaviors related to classroom language learning.
Causes: Language anxiety occurs because students realize they will have difficulty communicating. This can challenge their self-perception as a competent individual. The inability to represent themselves authentically results in anxiety. Due to the likelihood of failure, learners avoid taking risks and they avoid situations that require them to communicate.
Three components: Communication apprehension, test anxiety, Fear of evaluation.
PILOT STUDY: Sequential exploratory design. Focus group of 78 students who claimed to experience fear of speaking in Spanish. Created a survey and piloted it with 75 students. High reliability and construct validity.
RESULTS: 1/3 or more of students expressed high anxiety on most items.
CONCLUSION: Language anxiety is a common problem.
IMPLICATIONS: Teach students how to cope and make the classroom less stressful.
Schwabe and Wolfe (2009)
The authors conducted a RCT to examine the effect of stress on word learning and memory recall. They found that participants in a stress condition during vocabulary learning recalled 30% less than control participants during recall tasks.
PARTICIPANTS: 48 adult men and women in Germany
METHODS: A RCT. Treatment group participants learned 32 words while hand was submerged in ice cold water. They also were videotaped and watched by a stern researcher. Control group participants learned the words with hand submerged in warm water and without video or a researcher present. The words were positive, negative, neutral, and contextual. Participants took a test of the words 24 hours after exposure.
INSTRUMENTS: Subjective stress rating, blood pressure, salivary cortisol
ANALYSIS: ANOVA with effect sizes
RESULTS: Treatment group participants performed significantly poorer on both free recall and recognition tests of the words. The word category did not interact with stress. Both groups recalled contextualized words more.
CONCLUSIONS: Stress likely interferes with the memory encoding process in the hippocampus. Stress also interferes with attention that limits the ability of the PFC to focus on the relevant stimuli.
Gee (2008)
- Academic English is a unique specialized register (vocab, grammar, rhetoric)
- Gee (2008): AE is a school discourse, must be learned in social setting
- AE must be learned in a social setting because social settings provide the necessary affordances for learning.
- Affordances=language, technology, other people
- Ss don’t have OTL if don’t perceive or know how to use affordances
- peers can act as affordances for understanding the perspective their writing communicates
- Example: hedging minimizes your confidence while boosting maximizes it
L and L
Qualitative Data Analysis
Steps in analysis:
- Condensed transcription
- Apply codes (in vivo, descriptive, process)
- Create and define categories
- Create themes (broad statements about data that help answer RQs)
- Continue until data is saturated (point when no new understanding occurs)
- Create an audit trail (visualization of analytical decisions)
Validity
- Deals with the truth value of conclusions
- Trustworthiness: The degree to which the researcher’s data collection, analysis and findings are verifiable.
Krishnan (2009)
The author critically examines recent arguments in favor of promoting interdisciplinarity, and he finds some barriers to this movement.
- The author examines interdisciplinarity from the lenses of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, management and education.
- The author argues that a primary role of disciplines is to create coherence for theories, concepts, methods, and what counts as knowledge. We will continue to need disciplines to serve these functions.
- Policing: disciplines involve policing speech, thought, and behaviors
- PHILOSOPHY: The philosophical perspective involves some who view knowledge as socially constructed to serve group interests.
- Each discipline has it’s own language games with rules for how language should be used. Peer review is a good example of disciplines monitoring how language is used, and what counts as knowledge.
- POP: Students need to learn the “language games” of their academic discipline. They also need to learn the cultural practices of the academic discipline. Teachers need to provide sufficient economic value to paying students.
Sibinga et al. (2014)
The authors conducted a RCT to determine whether a MBSR intervention was an effective treatment for trauma induced stress in urban adolescents.
METHOD: Mixed methods RCT that used an active control group
PARTICIPANTS: 130 African American patients in Baltimore 13-21 years old.
PROCEDURE: Treatment group participants participated in a nine-week MBSR intervention. The control group participated in a Healthy Topics course about healthy lifestyle choices.
INSTRUMENTS: Surveys to measure anxiety and other psychological factors. A convenience sample of 30 participants for individual semi-structured interviews.
FINDINGS:
QUANT: The authors used descriptive statistics to describe the percent of completers and their demographics. When using regression analysis to control for baseline differences, the researchers did not find a significant treatment effect
QUAL: The interview data, however, revealed that participants viewed the treatment as helpful for reducing stress. They reported improvement in their ability to self-regulate their emotions. They also reported using the techniques in their lives to reduce stress and deescalate conflicts.
L and L
QUAL Methodologies
Triangulation: participants, data, researcher, theory
Grounded theory: Constructing a theory that is grounded in the data. Look at the data first then construct a theory from the data. Data and analysis are simultaneous.
Phenomenology:
- Focuses on identifying how a phenomenon is universally experienced.
- Focuses on identifying the essence of the experience
- in-depth interviews and developing themes
Ethnography:
- The study of cultural patterns and everyday practices and perspectives in natural settings.
- Emic/etic perspectives
- Use a variety of sources
Dusenbury (2003)
The author’s define fidelity of implementation as the extent to which program service providers implement the program design as intended by the developers.
Five components of fidelity: Adherence, dose, quality of delivery, participant responsiveness, program differentiation
Johnston et al. (2018)
GOAL:The goal of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention to increase knowledge, awareness, and strategy use for decreasing bullying
DESIGN: MM Convergent design with pre-post of surveys and post interviews
PARTICIPANTS: A stratified random sample of 200 high school students
MEASURES: surveys for awareness, knowledge, and confidence for dealing with bullying
ANALYSIS: ANOVA, t-test, descriptives
FINDINGS: The authors found significant increase in knowledge and use of anti-bullying strategies (ANOVA, T-test), they found which strategies Ss used more and less. QUAL: corroborated quant findings
DEPTH: The lowest frequency was for reporting bullying to teachers. The qual interviews revealed that Ss didn’t trust teachers to improve the problem.
NEW INSIGHTS: identified the unintended consequence of tension with peers when using strategies
IMPLICATIONS: Counselors should use the program, need an anonymous reporting mechanism
Schwabe and Wolfe (2009)
The authors conducted a RCT to examine the effect of stress on word learning and memory recall. They found that participants in a stress condition during vocabulary learning recalled 30% less than control participants during recall tasks.
PARTICIPANTS: 48 adult men and women in Germany
METHODS: A RCT. Treatment group participants learned 32 words while hand was submerged in ice cold water. They also were videotaped and watched by a stern researcher. Control group participants learned the words with hand submerged in warm water and without video or a researcher present. The words were positive, negative, neutral, and contextual. Participants took a test of the words 24 hours after exposure.
INSTRUMENTS: Subjective stress rating, blood pressure, salivary cortisol
ANALYSIS: ANOVA with effect sizes RESULTS: Treatment group participants performed significantly poorer on both free recall and recognition tests of the words. The word category did not interact with stress. Both groups recalled contextualized words more.
CONCLUSIONS: Stress likely interferes with the memory encoding process in the hippocampus. Stress also interferes with attention that limits the ability of the PFC to focus on the relevant stimuli.
Hardiman (2012)
The author argues that setting the emotional climate is the most important aspect of teaching. Goal: Set a positive emotional climate and help students make an emotional connection to learning.
Brain Science: The Amygdala is responsible for the brain’s stress response. It is directly connected to the hippocampus which processes memory.Environmental stimuli reach the amygdala quicker than the cortex, which processes higher order thinking. Chronic stress can damage the hippocampus, and it can interfere with working memory.
Recommendtions:
- Praise student effort instead of intelligence.
- Create predictable class rituals (peer review activities)
- Offer students choices (students can choose readings for their text responses). This increases motivation and emotional connection to content.
Schmidt and Frota (1986)
The authors conducted a single case case study to help better understand factors that contributed to effective second language acquisition.
In the study, the lead author kept a daily journal about his experiences studying Portuguese in Brazil, both in school and informally with friends. The authors also recorded 4 hour-long conversations in Portuguese each month. The authors concluded that instruction and exposure to target forms in the input was not sufficient for learning the forms.
Evidence: the learner encountered some forms many times but never learned them, and he was taught certain forms that he never learned. For example, the recordings show that he was exposed to a way of answering questions many times, but he never learned it. However, when he was taught something and then commented on noticing it in his journal he succeeded in learning it.
Conclusion: Learners must encounter language forms in the input but they must also consciously notice the forms and corrections in order to learn. Learners must notice the gap between their production and the native-like production. Fossilization: Learners may continue to use incorrect forms because they never noticed them as errors so they became automatized through habit. Difficult to extinguish.
Mezirow (1997)
Transformative learning theory. The author argues that adult learning is different from child learning because adults have extensive prior knowledge which contributes to Frames of Reference. In order to learn new content and ways of thinking, adult learners need to critically assess their Frames of Reference and adjust them to fit new knowledge.
FRAME of REFERENCE: A coherent body of thinking that structures our assumptions about the world. This is built from our caregivers and culture. The frame of reference consists of HABITS of MIND and POINTS of VIEW
HABITS of MIND are habitual ways of thinking about the world (e.g. perfectionism). These are more durable and less accessible.
POINTS of VIEW are the specific application of a habit of mind to a specific situation. (e.g. I should only write a sentence if I am certain that it is grammatically accurate).
Changing FOR: In order to transform a FOR we need to have new experiences that challenge our underlying assumptions. When we have a new experience that conflicts with our assumptions, we experience cognitive dissonance. This provokes critical reflection of assumptions. Critical dialogues can be a good way to provoke new experiences.
EDUCATORS: 1. Teachers need to help students identify their assumptions and analyze them. 2. Teachers need to support critical dialogues that can facilitate critical reflection of assumptions.
Shadish, Cook, and Campbell (2002) VALIDITY
VALIDITY is a quality of inferences. It refers to the truth of inferences drawn from evidence. Does the evidence support the conclusions.
VALIDITY THREATS=Other causes that could have produced the effect in the absence of the IV. STATISTICAL CONCLUSION VALIDITY: Refers to the extent to which you can infer that the IV and DV covary with each other. Threats: low power (recruit more Ss, use Qual); unreliable implementation (monitor fidelity)
INTERNAL VALIDITY: The researcher’s ability to infer a causal relationship between the IV and DV and exclude other possible causes.
INTERNAL VALIDITY THREATS: Maturation (placement test); History (focused questions); Attrition (quality instruction)
PLAUSABILITY: Can’t control all threats so focus on plausible ones
CONTENT VALIDITY: measuring what you say you are measuring (use expert research)
CONSTRUCT VALIDITY: Involves making inferences about higher order constructs based on the particular sample in the study. Use validated instruments that differentiate from similar constructs; use multiple measures (e.g. qual and quant)
EXTERNAL VALIDITY: The extent to which inferences can extend to other contexts. Provide detailed description so others can make inferences for their context.
Rice (2017) Anthropology definition
The author presents an introduction to the anthropological perspective on education.
CULTURE=the entire set of behaviors, values, and beliefs of a society. These are all learned.
GOAL: The goal of anthropologists is to achieve as close to an insider’s perspective on the culture as possible. This involves an Emic vs. Etic perspective.
FORMAL/INFORMAL: Anthropologists study both formal and informal learning.
TOPICS: The social reproduction of inequality in schools, the hidden curriculum.
KEY FIGURES: Bordieu (Cultural and Social Capital); Lareau (2011) The role of language in reproduction of inequality.
Johnson and Onwuegbuzie (2004)
The authors argue against the paradigm wars and the incompatibility thesis.
They claim that both quantitative and qualitative methods are useful. Neither is inherently better.
Research Questions: A researcher should always pick a method that is best suited to answer their research question.
Pragmatism: mixed methods research is based in a philosophy of pragmatism. Pragmatism udges the truth value of a belief based on the empirical and practical consequences.
MM definition: Mixed methods research involves combining both qualitative and quantitative research methods into one study. The goal is to draw on the complimentary strengths and non-overlapping weaknesses of each. Data interpretation should be integrated at some point.
Seven steps in MM research:
- Write research questions
- Define the research purpose
- Create the research design
- Collect data
- Analyze data
- interpret data
- Validate data
Lester (2005)
A framework is a way of organizing ideas so they can be developed further.
Two Puropses:
- To help design research studies (RQs and constructs)
- To help interpret data
Theoretical Framework: A guide to research activities that is based on a prior well-established theory that provides a coherent explanation of a phenomenon. In a study you can support, extend, or modify a theory- Limitation: people may want to force data to fit the theory
Conceptual Framework: A collection of ideas and their relationships that helps provide a justification for what you want to research. Can include a bricolage of past ideas Locke=Used observation as primary form of evidence
Shadish, Cook, and Campbell (2002) Experimentation
Experiments and Causal Inferences:
Experimentation: Experimentation involves direct manipulation of a phenomenon. The goal of an experiment is to approximate the counterfactual in order to test a causal chain and identify whether certain variables lead to expected effects.
Counterfactual: What would have happened to participants in the treatment group if they simultaneously did not receive the treatment.
Quasi-experimentation: Like true experiments they attempt to test hypothesis about manipulable variables but they don’t involve randomization so they have less compelling support for counter factuals.
CAUSES: The authors argue that causes are often complex, and it is not easy to isolate a single cause. Experimentation involves efforts to control the dependent variable and possible confounding factors.
Molar and Molecular: Researchers aim to be able to attribute causes to the molar and molecular causes. There is no 1:1 relationship between experiments and reality.
Window on Nature: Experiments do not offer a perfect window on nature. As a result, all experiments involve trust and ambiguity.
Long (1996) The Interaction Hypothesis
The author argues that comprehensible input alone is insufficient for language acquisition. For example, immersion studies showed deficits in productive skills.
Adult language learners require selective attention to relevant aspects of the language in order to acquire forms to a native-like level.
Negotiation for meaning is the primary means through which attention is focused on language forms. NFM occurs when there is a communication break-down and speakers must cooperate to repair the breakdown.
Positive and negative evidence play a role in language acquisition. Positive evidence shows what is possible, and negative evidence helps focus on forms and repair errors. Negotiation for Meaning, especially interactional adjustments, facilitates SLA by focusing learners’ attention on forms they need to acquire.
Pedersen (2000)
Pedersen argues for an inclusive definition of multiculturalism.
DEFINITION: Pedersen defines culture as the “rules of the game” that we learn as children. It is easy to assume that our culture is best. Using self-reference criteria to judge other cultures is the primary enemy of multiculturalism.
Adaptation: Pedersen argues that due to the increasing multicultural nature of the U.S., we need to learn how to adapt to interacting with other cultures.
9 rules: He provides nine rules for multiculturalism to help people adapt. Two of these rules are particularly relevant for the issue of teaching academic English.
- Cultural similarities and differences are both important. Multiculturalism involves a paradox in which we have to look at how we are the same and different at the same time. Both are necessary for understanding the cultural context. This relates to teaching students academic English because the culture of the academic community and the students’ home communities are both equally valid.
- Culture is complex and dynamic. Individuals can hold aspects of multiple cultural perspectives that may conflict or change. It is not necessary to resolve this conflict. This relates to teaching academic English because we are not asking students to give up their home culture. We are asking to incorporate the new academic culture into their cultural repertoire.
Guba (1981)
Establishing the trustworthiness of naturalistic research is different from rationalistic research.
Naturalistic research assumes:
- that multiple realities exist, and the goal of the naturalistic researcher is to accurately represent those realities.
- The researcher is the instrument in naturalistic paradigm, and research occurs in naturalistic settings.
- You should use base the decision to use QUANT or QUAL on the nature of the problem.
Learning Theories
Shaddish, Cook, and Campbell (2002)
Validity Threats
The authors explain the concept of validity and how to address threats to validity.
Validity threats: Reasons why our inferences about our research findings can be wrong or only partially supported.
Threats to internal validity: Causes other than the independent variable for an observed effect. When you observe the effect in the absence of the IV.
