I am going to refer to some of the challenges I met during my study under three main headlines which are organizational or practical challenges, those challenges that are of a pedagogical or ethical nature and challenges that arise from the fact that two different systems, that of university or science and that of school sometimes have different needs and different focus in their work.
5.2.1 Organisational challenges
Concerning organizational challenges there was on the one hand a problem which I have faced as a teacher many times before that is to make sure information about the study actually reached the home and then the information about consenting to participate reached me again. The time, shortly before Christmas, did not work in my favour. This of course had the effect that not as many students participated as I had hoped for and that this had not always to do with their unwillingness to participate but with the fact that they just forgot to hand in the admission slip. There were quite a number of students who told me in person that they would not mind participating but that they just kept forgetting to hand in the slip and while the parents might also not be opposed to it, the study was just not that important to them.
Another problem I faced was that of equipment. While I had made some inquiries concerning the availability of material, I especially at one school was confronted with the problem that many of the PCs did not work which made it difficult to give access to the audio files and caused some of the students not to be finished which frustrated them understandably. The fact that in one session one member of staff was missing caused some disturbance because I had to be constantly moving between the classrooms, and some students might not have the support and the clarifications they would have needed. This might have caused slightly worse results
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than could have been possible especially for students that are a little bit uneasy about their own performance.
The results of my study suggest that insetting exhaustion might have had an effect on performance during the second reading test. If this is so, then the fact that the tests were carried out at different times of the day, some of the students taking the test at 8 o’clock and some starting as late as 13 o’clock, might have had effect that distorted my focus.
5.2.2 The needs of two different systems
This leads me to the next point, which is that me and the teachers representing the two systems of university and school had a different focus and prioritized different aspects of the process and made different decisions on this basis. While for me the study was the most important thing and I focused most of my energy on this, the teachers had to fit in my project into all the other things they had to organise and keep in mind. While it was obvious that the teachers tried to be very helpful, different perspectives let to situations that were not optimal. Teachers were, for example, interested in carrying out the test in large groups so that other teaching resources could be freed which made the organization more difficult for me. When teachers could not come due to illness, I was not informed even though I made have had to adapt to this situation. Moreover, teachers changed the groups so that I lost time rearranging material for the students. In an attempt to be respectful to the teachers, I had sometimes failed to communicate clearly enough what I need and why.
5.2.3 Pedagogical concerns and ethical challenges
The last point is maybe the most important one, and it deals with pedagogical concerns or ethical challenges. This is of course again linked to different needs of students and teachers and mine as a researcher. I had started out with the premise to find out how multimodal texts could especially support students with low reading proficiency so that I could adapt my teachings to their needs in my future teachings. My motive had thus been driven very much by the needs of these students, and my aim was to make school life a little bit easier for them. Those students who would have fallen into this category though were, maybe not surprisingly, not very enthused about taking part in my study. Obviously, they have realized by now that they are not performing as well as other students and did not feel like having this determined one more time. This meant that many of those students, as reported by the teachers, did not participate in the study to begin with. I think that those with lower reading proficiency who did participate in the end were to different degrees frustrated which had been anticipated by
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one of the teachers. Especially the Hodder test lead to a negative experience for some students because they got very few items right and were, of course, aware of this. While it was positive for my purposes to have very diverse results with a great range of results, some students experienced taking the test as very stressful and experienced a sense of failure. Explaining that they were not graded and that low results would not have any negative consequences did not seem to help to soften this. Considering that a very important goal of the Norwegian school system is that every student experiences success and a sense of achievement, this has to be seen quite critical.
5.2.4 Meeting the challenges
In case I would carry out a similar study, there are certain aspects I would try to remedy that challenged my study this time. These have to do with the number of participants, communication, organization and ethical aspects of my study. Moreover, I would choose a design that includes more methodological approaches.
In case parents need to give their permission, I would address them directly at a parent- teacher evening and would take good time to communicate what the study is actually about and how this could benefit their own child and future students of English. Moreover, I would plan in more time to very precisely communicate what my study is about to the teachers, as well as my needs, and to give room to accommodate the teacher’s wishes.
I assume that the organization would be less of a problem if the parameters would have been made very clear from the beginning. When it comes to ethical challenges, I would probably choose an easier reading proficiency test or a test that can be carried out electronically and that adapts to the level of the test-taker. This would give all the students a possibility to experience a sense of achievement while at the same time helping science.