EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT PP OBSERVATION Flashcards
1
Q
Wright (Practical and Validity Issues)- .
A
- Personal characteristics like age, gender and ethnicity can affect the process of observation.
- Even with gender or age, the power difference between young people and adults is a major barrier to uncovering real attitudes and pupils behaviours, presenting a false image when being observed which undermines validity.
- Not only this, but practically schools are complex and so are time-consuming to observe, taking people like Lacey two months to get familiar with the school.
- Timetables and holidays also affect when these observations could take place, and schools are also busy public places and so an observer may find it difficult to find the privacy needed to record observations.
- This was the case for Hammersley who had to covertly write down teachers conversations, and often made mistakes or decreased validity by relying on his own interpretation of conversations he’s heard.
- There’s also a trend where teachers disguise their feelings or alter their behaviours when being observed, especially by school managers or inspectors. The Hawthorne effect may also be present which could ruin validity, which can’t be resolved by covert observation as this is hard in a classroom setting.
- Lastly, validity may be diminished due to the lack of representativeness- there are around 30,000 primary schools and 4,000 secondary schools in England and Wales, with each having an average of 70 classes, making it hard to gain a proper representative sample
2
Q
Eval (Interpretivists, Unstructured Observation, Advantages)-
A
- Interpretivists favour the use of less structured, more flexible, qualitative observational methods.
- These allow them to gain access to the meanings that teachers and pupils give to situations by immersing themselves in those situations, giving an authentic understanding of the world-views of social actors.
- Unlike structured methods with their observation schedules, this approach does not make assumptions in advance about what the key research issues will be, allowing them to get an ‘overall feel’.
3
Q
FIAC (Structure Observation, Practical and Reliability Advantages)-
A
- Favoured by positivists, who often use the Flanders system of interaction analysis categories.
- This measures pupil-pupil and pupil-teacher interactions quantitatively, involving an observer using a standard chart to record interactions at three-second intervals, placing each observation in a pre-defined behaviour category.
These observations can then be easily converted into quantitative data by counting the number of times each behaviour occurs, which is how Flanders found that in the typical American classroom, 68% of time is taken up by teacher talk, and 20% by pupil talk, with the other 12% being filled with silence or confusion. - This often tends to be cheap, quick, and also reliable as the formula is easily replicable.
4
Q
Eval (Delamont, Structured Observation, Validity Disadvantages)-
A
- Interpretivists criticise structured observation of classroom interaction as it lacks validity.
- Delamont argued that simply counting classroom behaviour and classifying it into a limited number of predefined categories ignores the meanings that pupils and teachers attach to it.
