Teaching Approaches to Promote Consistent ... - Learning Wales

There are seven pupils for whom English is an additional language, but none of thesepupils is at an early stage of learning English.3.3 Design and construction of pro-formas for data collectionThe design of each instrument was a compromise between the need to collect data ofobvious and immediate relevance to the research and the need to understand such datain its educational context by collecting the widest possible range of information. Afurther consideration given to the design of the instruments was ease of data analysis.This was particularly important in view of the fact that this was a project with a shorttime scale. The literature review indicated the factors at school and classroom levellikely to be relevant in understanding teaching approaches. As far as possible, indesigning each pro-forma, the curriculum, school policy and the classroom practiceissues were considered separately.Each type of data collection pro-forma was piloted in two schools. Both schools hadconsistently high level 4 results in both English and mathematics in the previous threeyears. One school had a below average percentage of pupils receiving free schoolmeals and parents of many pupils were in professional jobs. The other school had anabove average percentage of pupils receiving free school meals and was in an area ofhigh unemployment. After reviewing both the process of data collection and the dataitself, some changes 6 were made to the pro-formas. It is the final pro-formas thatappear in appendix 3.3.4 Procedures for data collectionTape recorded interviews with teachers were not requested, nor was any video- oraudio-recording of lessons undertaken. Data collectors made notes throughout theinterviews or lessons observed. As soon as possible afterwards these were annotatedin order to provide the richest possible information and to clarify possible areas ofambiguity. Five of the pupil focus groups were audio-taped with the explicit priorpermission of the head teacher and parents. This was because it proved difficult for asingle data collector to make detailed notes while interacting with a focus group of six6 These included eliminating overlap between questions, revising layout to assist both data collectorsand research team.35