Teaching Approaches to Promote Consistent ... - Learning Wales

children. By having some focus groups audio taped, the research team could seewhether richer data were generated.During visits, data collectors observed an English and a mathematics lesson in Year 3,4, 5 and 6, interviewed each class teacher, two subject co-ordinators and the headteacher, and held four focus group sessions with pupils 7 . In addition, in each schooldata collectors obtained samples of marked pupils’ work in each subject and each yeargroup and samples of teachers’ planning from each subject and year group. In thefinal analysis this data was not used as it did not add anything substantial to theanalysis.3.5 Procedures for data analysis.The data from each school were read by another team member, who transcribedinformation of particular relevance to the research questions on to data summarysheets. As far as possible, data were then re-read by other members of the team, whochecked the accuracy of summaries to field notes. This gave an overview of a verylarge amount of data, from which two sets of profiles were produced:(a) a profile of each school, and of each group of schools;(b) a profile of data relevant to each of the research questions, based on the structureof each pro-forma.In practice, the first of these was useful in giving an overview of the data but not inreporting the findings, because the patterns of level 4 results in English andmathematics in previous years were not necessarily being maintained in the year ofthis research.7 One session was conducted with each year group (Y3-Y6)36