Evaluating ICT for Education in Africa - Royal Holloway, University of ...

you can follow that. It gives you guidelines for what to askand allows you to keep on bringing it back on track.‟Facilitating this dynamic interaction through a focus group enriched theresearch process when it operated effectively. However in Malawi there wereoccasions where such interaction could not be achieved without the use ofadditional tools, particularly the Interactive Learning Octagon, and this isconsidered in the following discussion regarding visual approaches.Alongside the success of conducting focus groups with teachers were thechallenges encountered when the research team began interacting withchildren in this environment. Initial attempts to conduct focus groups inMalawi and Ethiopia with students aged between seven and 14 years olddemonstrated that, aside from a few notable exceptions, they lacked theconfidence to talk without a clearly structured and led environment withquestions they could each answer in turn. This was exacerbated in ruralMalawi by the fact that the children were entirely unaccustomed tointeracting with white people. The underlying reasons for this are explored ingreater detail throughout Chapter 8.Group interviewsFollowing the first stage of research in Malawi it was decided that focusgroups should be replaced by group interviews when interacting withchildren to provide a more settled and structured environment, and the samewas done in Ethiopia. There were considerable benefits from the additionalstructure of the group interviews in facilitating a more relaxed andinformative discussion when compared with the initial focus groups.However, despite the improvement and the efforts of the monitoring andevaluation teams in both locations to follow conventional good-practiceguides and ensure consistency (Valentine 1999), the responses from thegroup interviews with children remained varied. The primary reason for thiswas the limited ability of the children to engage with critical „why-based‟questions (Paul and Elder 2007a). As I noted in my research diary havingspent time in Mtentera (14/11/07):173