QUALITATIVE METHODS

The qualitative data primarily consisted of the results of the participant researcher’s observations, field notes and students’ worksheets, and interview data.

3.6.2.1 Classroom Observations

The classroom observations of this study were conducted in different grades of biology classes at one public senior high school in Western Australia. During classroom observations, the researcher assumed the role of an “observer as participant” (Merriam, 1998a, p. 101), where the researcher did not engage in the regular instructional activities of the biology classes. Throughout the investigation, the researcher did not interfere in the teaching so that the control of the classroom remained with the teacher. Field notes were recorded by the researcher and classroom activities specifically of interest to the research were audio-taped.

The classes were observed to different degrees depending on the amount of time that teachers were prepared to have the researcher in their classrooms, the availability of classroom time, and the availability of students for further data collection. This meant that a variety of biological topics taught by different biology teachers and students from different grades were observed by the research.

The observations allowed the researcher to observe teachers’ and students’ actions in their natural field setting. As Merriam (1998b) pointed out, not only can observations provide a researcher with knowledge of the specific content, the researcher can also observe things that the observed would not have been willing to talk about, i.e., specific instances could serve as references for subsequent interviews. During the observations, teachers’ methods of teaching a biology concept with diagrams were recorded and analysed so as to find out how different types of diagrams were used in the secondary biology teaching.

The following research question was addressed:

4. How do teachers choose to use different types of diagrams when teaching secondary biology?

Table 3.4 Summary Table of Lessons Observed

Teachers Grade # of lessons

observed

Biological Contents Observed

K Y 11, Y12 40 Sensory system,

Photosynthesis

D Y 11, Y12 15 Genetics,

respiration

C Y9, Y10 10 Food chains

B Y9, Y10 15 Blood Circulation

S Y9 12 Cell structure,

Total 5 Biology teachers

Y9 – Y12 92

As shown in Table 3.4, in total 92 biology classes from five teachers were observed, and a great number of field notes, teachers’ handouts and student worksheets were collected and examined. The observations were conducted on a regular basis, about three or four times every week. The researcher spent more than one semester (seven months) in the school observing most of the biology teachers’ lessons. For every lesson observed, the field notes were jotted down so that could be collated with teachers’ handouts. To ensure the data collection procedures were reliable, these notes and observations were routinely discussed with the researcher’s supervisor and another researcher who had also made observations in the same biology teachers’ classrooms.

3.6.2.2 Interviews

The student interviews aim at probing students’ conceptual understanding of diagrams in terms of whether or not they complement, constrain and or help construct the other mode of representation, namely, text. The interviews were semi- structured with a set of questions and issues to be explored. In order to probe the post-instruction understanding of a number of biological diagrams, particularly the 63biological concepts, the content of the student interviews took the form of “interview about concepts” (Carr, 1996). Consequently, the semi-structured

interview was considered to be appropriate for the data collection in this research because a certain level of structure was desirable for the interviews in order to give direction to the data collection and facilitate data analysis with adequate reliability. The interview protocols used in the study allowed the interviewer to probe and expand the interviewees’ responses. The total number of students interviewed across years is shown in Table 3.5.

The interviewing process can be summarized as: (1) To investigate interview participants’ understanding of one representation – diagram / text; (2) To retrieve the interpretation of the other representation – text / diagram; (3) To compare the information from both representations and analyse how they relate to each other. The questions and wording were predetermined with the aim of exploring students’ interpretation of diagrams and text of topics that they had already studied in the class several months prior to the interviews. Interviewed participants were audio-recorded and fully transcribed. According to Chi (1997), verbal analysis is a method for quantifying the subjective or qualitative coding of the contents of verbal utterances whereby the researcher tabulates, counts and draws relations between the occurrences of different kinds of utterances to reduce the subjectiveness of qualitative coding (Guba & Lincoln, 1989). Unlike protocol analysis, verbal analysis focuses on capturing student’s knowledge and the cognitive processes. The interviewing data were vital in probing students’ conceptual processes while learning biology domain knowledge with diagrams.

Table 3.5 Summary of Interview Participants

Grade Year 9 Year 10 Year 11 Year 12 SUM

Number of students

Nil 9 2 Nil 11

Participation was voluntary and each of the 11 participants explained their understanding process by relating both types of representations. In order to protect privacy, the 11 students are referred to in this thesis later as Student 1, student 2,… and student 11, that is, the sequence of attending the interview. The number attached

to each student has nothing to do with his / her years of schooling or academic achievement, but only served as an identity for the convenience of data analysis. The fourth research phase focused on the Research Question 7: What roles do diagrams and text play when learners relate both representations to understand biological concepts? The researcher investigated how the two representations relate to each other in individual’s learning of biological content knowledge. Students’ interpretations from the two representations were analysed in regard to the theoretical framework, and the interview data provided opportunities for exploring the effects that multiple types of representations such as diagrammatic and textual representations on the biological learning.

3.7ANALYSISANDINTERPRETATIONOFDATA

The outlined methodology and its associated methods in collecting data were conducted from multiple sources using mixed research methods (Creswell, 1994). The mixed methods require suitable strategies in data analysis and interpretation. The section provides a summary of these methods by mapping them according to the nature of the data collected.