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Methodology
For this research an action research methodology (Cohen, Manion & Morrisson, 2000) was followed in the form of a
disciplined self-reflective inquiry into a small scale, real-world intervention in an attempt to reform and improve
practice. It is reflective in that it strives to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and is done by a practitioner
focusing on his own work, combining diagnosis with reflection and focusing on practical issues. Action research
was selected as a methodology because of the position of the researcher as a participant in the process. In this way
the research was conducted from an internal, rather than an external perspective. On the down side, of course, this
means that the researcher can make no claim of impartiality, and the extent to which the results reported here can be
transferred elsewhere is limited. Nevertheless, as has been stated before the purpose of this research is not to
“prove” but rather to share, and in this respect it is hoped that the results of this action research study will resonate
with results obtained by other researchers.
The three “scenes” presented here are drawn from courses in a Masters’ Degree programme in Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT) for Education, presented by a professor from South Africa, to twelve students of
the Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST), Khartoum over a period of two years. Pretoria, South
Africa is a historically Christian city with English as its lingua franca. Khartoum, Sudan is a predominantly Muslim
city with Arabic as its dominant (if not only) language.
Twelve promising graduates of the education faculty of SUST were selected to follow the program, after having
attended six months of intensive English language and computer literacy training. I have been a professor of
computers in education since 1994, with my main function being the co-ordination and presentation of a two-year
coursework Masters degree with a mini-dissertation. In 1994 I read, and met with Seymour Papert and started
working in a “constructionist” fashion. Instead of lectures I would usually give students learning tasks involving
some development of technology – from which I hoped that they would construct the knowledge for themselves. In
1996 I took this practice onto the Internet in that many of the work done by my students would be web-based (Cronje
1997). The work we did in Sudan was an extension of this approach.
Assessment strategies varied throughout the course but students were required to construct a digital portfolio
containing all work produced during the course. The principal data sources are artefacts produced by students during
selected courses of the programme as well as the evaluation instruments and evaluation results produced during the
assessment. Interpretation of data was qualitative and involved a close scrutiny to identify trends and draw
conclusions.
Findings
The following section will discuss the three evaluation scenes that were selected. The first illustrates what happened
when a positivist approach was followed, functioning in the injection quadrant. The second shows the implications of
a structuralist/interpretivist approach in the construction quadrant, and the third tends towards a holistic/feminist
approach in the integration quadrant. The scenes depict the creation and evaluation of digital artefacts that were
included in the portfolios of the students during the action research cycles in which we attempted to gather and refine
the evidence that allowed us to report on the progress of the twelve students on the programme. The cyclic nature of
action research makes it hard to separate the description of the findings from the actual activities from which those
findings were derived. Thus a narrative reporting style will be followed, and the rhythm of each scene will be “we
found… so we did… so we found…”
Scene one: A mark out of 200
The first graded assignment given to the students was to conduct a dynamic evaluation of a piece of educational
software of their own choice and to comment on its suitability for a given target population. The resultant essay was
the main element of the portfolio for a course on “The evaluation of educational software and its effect on learning”
the course served partly to introduce students to educational software, but mainly to sharpen their skills in empirical
research methodology.
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