Comunicar 39-ingles - Revista Comunicar

162Comunicar, 39, XX, 2012variety of university degrees and who wanted toobtain a diploma to certify their psycho-pedagogicalknowledge and training to educate secondary schoolstudents. Twenty students participated.• The group of experts was made up of four teachers,highly specialised in teaching/learning systems.Three were specialists and members of distance learninginstitutions, two of whom were from the OpenUniversity (United Kingdom) and a third was from theUNED (Spain). The fourth member is a renownedSpanish expert in virtual training.2.2. Rigorous methodologyA constant throughout the process has been therigorous methodology in the design and development ofthe study. This enabled us to generate evidential data,Table 1.Times, techniques and research sources.i.e., consolidate the research’s rigour and relevance. Todo so we controlled the four concepts that according toRodriguez, Gil & Garcia (1999) are essential: credibility,transfer, consistency and validation.3. Results3.1. Data synthesisTo divide this study into units we followed a thematicapproach that considered talks, events and activitiestaking place in the same situation studied and thepossibility of finding segments that speak about a similarsubject. This procedure enabled us to synthesizeand create group units of meaning that match the studyobjectives.For the identification and classification of items wedevised a system of categories and sub-categories followinga deductive-inductive classification. Deductively,since it was based on a previous research study(Alonso & Blázquez, 2009) that helped define the initialmacro-categories. Inductively, because we thenproceeded to devise new codes, categories and subcategoriesfrom the recorded data. The final categorysystem is described below (the sub-categories thatarise from the study are described in Table 3):3.2. Disposition and data transformationFor this stage we used the NVIVO qualitative dataanalysis software, which made the coding and analysisof the transcriptions or documents much easier. It helpedus to store, organize and extractsummarized reports of the most significantdata emerging from theanalysis, in addition to combine twodimensions in our analysis by integratinga narrative perspective and amore analytical one.In this phase of the analysis processthe results in Figure 1 are presentedby category and technique,indicating which category was addressed in each techniqueand if the assessment was positive or negative:Results that answer the data in Figure 1 are:a) Open questionnaire for the students. In theGeneral Aspects of the Assessment (GAA) category,the students surveyed (15 of the 17 questionnairesanalyzed) were pleased overall with the type of assessmentproposed: «From my point of view, the assessmentincludes all four dimensions of the assessmentprocess, that is: prior design of the criteria, a comparisonof information to obtain a balanced judgment, adecision-making process and the communication ofresults» (student).Some students suggested changes in the qualifica-Table 2. Criteria, strategies and study actions to guarantee a rigorous methodology.© ISSN: 1134-3478 • e-ISSN: 1988-3293• Pages 159-167