Methods in Context

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Using experiments to study education 

  • Application in the classroom – classrooms have clear boundaries in terms of space and time, making it easier for the researcher to achieve a degree of control over the situation and develop an effective experiment 
  • Reliability – often simple and are easy to repeat. Although experiments in educational settings may not be exactly replicable, they all have broadly similar features 
  • Ethical problems – students are more vulnerable and are less able to understand what is happening with them, meaning that they are less able to give informed consent  
  • Limited application  experiments are small-scaled and can usually examine a single aspect of behaviour and larger issues cannot be studied as easily using this method  
  • Controlling all variables – experiments require all variables to be controlled, however, schools are large, complex institutions and many variables will affect behaviour of teachers and pupils. It may be impossible to control all variables  
  • Often used to study; teacher expectations, classroom interactions, labelling, pupils self-concepts 
  • Less useful to study; gender and achievement, education policy, selection and segregation 

Using questionnaires to study education 

  • Practical issues – useful for gathering large quantities of data quickly and cheaply from a large number of pupils and teachers or educational establishments. Researchers are quickly able to quantify data and see correlations between factors like achievement with variables of the school  
  •  Sampling frames – schools are a good source of ready-made sampling frames. They keep a list of pupils and these can provide accurate sampling frames that can create a representative sample  
  • Response rate – often low but in schools, once the head teacher has put their authority behind the research, the pupils and teachers will be pressured to cooperate and more responses will be returned   
  • Researching pupils – children have shorter attention spans then adults so a short questionnaire would be more effective, but this limits the amount of information that can be gathered  
  • Operationalising concepts – turning abstract ideas into a measurable form is particularly difficult when researching pupils. Younger people have poorer grasps of abstract ideas so they are less likely to understand some of the questions  
  • Samples – schools may not keep lists that reflect the researcher’s interests   
  • Validity – life experiences of children are much narrower, so they may not know the answers to questions.  
  • Often used to study; class and achievement, parental attitudes to education, subject choice, material deprivation and achievement  
  • Less useful in; classroom interaction, labelling, gender and classroom behaviour  

Using structured interviews to study education  

  • Response rate – usually takes less time and so are less disruptive to schools activities. Researchers are more likely to receive official support for the study and the hierarchal nature of the school may work in their favour  
  • Reliability – easy to replicate and large scales patterns can be identified  
  • Validity – young people tend

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