The pre-experimental design

True experimental design is believed to be capable of establishing unambiguous cause-effect relationships (Dörnyei, 2007) through its rigorous characteristics and if employed in an intervention study, is capable of generating unparalleled data findings. Relying on it would enable researchers and practitioners to benefit from empirically-based insights, highly desirable for a developing nation such as Malaysia in moving towards becoming a nation driven by scientific standards of excellence. The common practice of most researchers employing true experimental design is to involve a treatment group (also known as an experimental group) that receives the treatment and a control group that provides a baseline for comparison to examine the effectiveness and relevance of a given intervention programme. Because of its quantitative nature, experimental design normally seeks to generalise the findings from a sample of participants from the research population which necessitates random participant selection and assignment.

The random assignment of sufficient participants to the experimental and control groups can provide a way of making the average participant in one group comparable to the average participant in the other group. This is usually conducted prior to the implementation of treatment and it is considered one of the significant breakthroughs in experimental design (Cook & Campbell, 1979). Nevertheless, in most cases in educational settings, randomness is rare as participants are usually taken from an entire class and they often need to be kept intact. This non-random quality of the participants has led to the emergence of the quasi-experiments which are similar to an actual experiment but without the random assignment or selection. The lack of random participant assignment has not allowed quasi-experiments to rise to the level of sophistication of true experiments (Thyer, 2012), but empirical evidence has convinced researchers to believe that when two equally rigorous experimental and

quasi-experimental designs are compared, they would yield comparable results (Dörnyei, 2007).

This study however could only employ a group of students from an intact classroom using the one-group pre-test-post-test design which falls under the category of pre- experimental design due to several reasons which are discussed here. The pre- experimental design adheres to basic experimental steps without the inclusion of a control group and the random assignment of research participants (Thyer, 2012). In other words, a single group is often studied but no comparison between equivalent non-treatment groups is made. Heffner (2014) describes three general types of study under the pre-experimental design label: the one shot case study design, the one- group pre-test-post-test study, and the static group comparison study. The one-group pre-test-post-test design assesses participants’ before and after exposure to a treatment to investigate if there has been a change in the dependent variable(s) of the study.

My initial study design was the non-equivalent (pre-test and post-test) control-group quasi-experimental design with treatment and control groups from two schools. Due to the length of research (spanning seven months for the quantitative phase), I had begun searching for interested and viable research-participant candidates prior to designing the study. Informal verbal consent had already been obtained from two teacher-participants who were interested. However, on presenting the project to the University of Sheffield Confirmation Review1_{, suggestions were made for me to} reduce the size of the participants so as to allow the study to be more manageable and ensure completion of the research and writing up of the thesis would be plausible within the doctoral programme time limit. I accepted the suggestion and was happy to oblige, particularly because the study was carried out on a tight financial budget and concentrating on a single research site would be more economical, involving fewer travel expenses. Because the teacher-participant chosen taught only one class of Fourth Formers, I had to change the design of the research to a single-group pre-test- post-test design without the use of a control group.

1 _{The confirmation review, among other purposes, is held during a doctoral student’s} first year to confirm whether his/her project has the potential for successful research at doctoral level within his/her study time limit. Source: Research Services, The University of Sheffield

The critical thinking test adopted was developed by Malaysian scholars (see 3.5.3) for the Fourth and Fifth form students (aged 16 and 17). After applying for access to the research site from the prime minister’s office, the permission letter specifically forbade involvement of the fifth form students in the study as they would be taking a national public examination at the end of the year. Introducing an intervention programme is considered a huge imposition on teachers and schools especially in the context of pressures like high-stakes examinations. Thus, I could only recruit Fourth Form students and both viable candidates (teachers) taught one class of Fourth Form students with several classes of Fifth Formers. With only one accessible class of Fourth Formers, the design became a one-group pre-test-post-test design as described earlier.

The variables of the study fall under the independent and dependent variables. The independent variables in the study are the teaching approach and the module. Using this variable, I aimed to measure the dependent variables, which were the students’ language attitudes and critical thinking scores as affected by the implementation of the teaching approach and module.