Ethical considerations

In the present study, the rights of all of the persons involved in the research, volunteer interviewers, students and teachers who constituted the samples, and the people who supported the administration of the questionnaire of the main study, were at all times respected following the principles and guidelines stated by the British Educational Research Association (BERA, 2011), and the Mexican Society of Psychologists. They were treated with respect, with dignity and sensitively.

The British Educational Research Association (2011) establishes that all educational research should be conducted with ethical respect for the person, knowledge, democratic values, the quality of education research and academic freedom.

The participants in the initial study and in the evaluation of the self-assessment tool were asked to give their informed consent to participate in the study. They received information about the purpose of the study and the way the data would be used. They were informed that their confidentiality would be at all times protected and that they could withdraw from the research at any time.

For the initial study, the researcher asked four students from the School of Psychology to participate in the research as interviewers. By getting the support of students of a similar age and characteristics to the ones who would be invited to participate in the interview, the intention was that the interviewer would not be perceived as a person of authority and that participants would not feel the need to please the interviewer or meet his or her expectations.

For the administration of the questionnaire to the teachers, the coordinator of the workshop gave out the questionnaire to avoid possible biased answers as a result of the teachers trying to meet the expectations of the researcher. Emphasis was made in both procedures, the semi-structured interview and the application of the questionnaire, that there were no correct answers to the open questions, and that the focus of the study was

to establish their conceptions, perceptions and experiences in relation to the topics raised in the questions.

As previously described (see 5.4.2 Data collection procedures), in the initial study, the interviewers asked the students who were invited to participate, to give their informed consent once they had explained to them the aim of the interview and informed them that they did not have to give their names since the data were to be anonymous.

In the same way, the coordinator who helped the researcher to administer the

questionnaire to the teachers at the beginning of the creativity workshop invited them to voluntarily participate in the research. She informed them of the aims of the research and made it clear that they were free to withdraw from the study at any time. The

questionnaire was also anonymous.

In the evaluation of the self-assessment tool, the teachers responding to the questionnaire received the same information and gave their informed consent. The privacy of all

participants was not infringed since all information was treated as confidential.

5.8 Summary and conclusions

The research methodology used in this study was a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The research included an initial study and the development of a self-assessment tool for teachers, which was piloted and evaluated. The first study was oriented to explore students’ and teachers’ implicit theories in relation to their conceptions of creativity, to what they perceived as obstacles and facilitators of their creativity in the classroom environment and to their conceptions of a creative teacher.

Findings from the initial study were used as input to build a tool to promote teachers’

reflection in relation to becoming aware of their skills, attitudes and behaviour to enable them to enhance students’ creativity through their teaching.

In the initial study, the quantitative approach was reflected in the way the emerging categories from students’ and teachers’ answers were ‘quantizised’ (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 1998) in order to reflect the predominant themes emerging from students’ and

teachers’ implicit theories. The qualitative aspect of the methodology consisted of a thematic analysis of such responses in order to extract units of meaning that were labelled based on students’ and teachers’ verbatim responses.

In the pilot study oriented to evaluating the self-assessment tool, a mixed method approach was also used. The main purpose of this part of the research was to evaluate whether the self-assessment tool was useful for enhancing teachers’ reflections and awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in relation to promoting students’ creativity through their teaching. For this purpose, two open-ended questions were used and a qualitative approach was used to analyse participants’ answers. A quantitative approach was used to analyse the responses given to the 33 statements with five options (always;

often; sometimes; rarely and never). Given the size of the sample a decision was taken to use descriptive statistics (means, standard deviations and correlations between items) to analyse the items used in the questionnaire. A factor analysis was not appropriate given the size of the sample.

Chapters 6 and 7 include findings from the initial study and discussion of these is offered in Chapter 8.

Chapter 6

Mexican students’ conceptions of creativity and perceptions