Blog #11: Information Behavior in Professional Contexts

For my research project, I am looking at the information seeking behaviors of teachers.  Case categorizes school teachers as practitioners under the umbrella of social scientists and claims they make "little use of research findings" (p. 295).  From my experience, unfortunately, this is very true.

Outside of coursework for master's degrees, most practicing teachers seem to spend very little time looking at research in education or their subject area journals and even less time contributing to them.  There are exceptions, of course: I adapted one of my most successful and long-standing lessons from an article that I just happened to see in the English Journal.  Certainly it's not for lack of interest, but like most things, the barrier is time.  Between lesson planning, delivering, and assessing; clerical work; communicating with parents; dealing with special cases; monitoring the hallway, playground, and lunchroom, etc., etc.; teachers simply do not have much extra time to devote to reading or conducting real research.  And since there is no financial advantage or professional expectation to do so, it falls to a very low priority task.

There is a clear and large divide between theoretical research and practice in education. So, how then do practicing teachers find out what they need to know? Personal learning communities provide the bulk of the information. Teacher-written websites, teacher-created district curriculum guides, and grade level or subject area PLC meetings can help teachers with lesson plans, teaching strategies, and rubrics. Taking time off to attend statewide or national conferences can also help spark new ideas.  Mostly, though, teachers have to rely on day-to-day creative planning, monitoring and adjusting in the classroom, and a healthy dose of self-reflection to develop a sound practice.

In terms of my progress this week, a couple more teachers completed my survey and I ended up with 21 responses, almost 50%.  I have created graphs and tables based on the quantitative responses via Google Forms, but have not yet officially started coding the longer essay responses.

Blog #10: Successes

This week, I am mostly feeling success!  I feel good about my survey questions, I was able to enter them into a Google Form and figure out how to send it to the teachers identified by my media specialist, and I am now having fun watching the responses roll in.  As of this writing, I have 18 respondents.   Out of the 44 teachers to whom I sent the survey, that is a 40% response rate.   Pretty good, right?  I did set a deadline of next Wednesday, so I may get a few more trickling in early next week, but most likely by then many of the non-respondents will have forgotten about it.  Even if this is it, though, I feel like it is a good sample size for a pilot study.  I am very grateful to my colleagues for taking the time to help me out.

As I briefly glance over the results, I am feeling glad I asked a combination of multiple-choice and short essay questions.  It is so interesting to read the longer answers.  I am already noticing some preliminary patterns.  The word "time, " for instance, appears far more frequently than any other word.  This is not surprising and seems to confirm the studies I cited in my lit review.  At the same time, it is surprising to see the diversity of responses.  How teachers perceive the role of the school media specialist is quite different depending upon the individual.  And answers are all over the board about whether our administration explicitly supports SLMS-teacher collaboration.  I never would have guessed this.

Of course, my feelings of success will surely dissipate as I start to try to make real sense out of all of this data.  My next step, after the survey closes next Wednesday, will be to try to input my data in NVivo and start coding.  I know that will be a major learning curve for me, and next week I probably will be writing about challenges, issues, and concerns instead of successes. But for now, I'm feeling good!

Blog #9: Potential Pitfalls

One of the greatest pitfalls of sending a voluntary email questionnaire to teachers is simply the rate of return.  Being a busy teacher myself who doesn't often have time to check my email during my teaching day, let alone take a survey, I know that not all of my subjects, no matter how nicely I ask, will end up completing the survey.  This may result in a thin data set and a threat to coming up with credible results.  One way to address this is to think carefully about timing.  I don't want to send the survey, for example, over the weekend or on a Friday afternoon.  Because we have an advisement period on Wednesdays and teachers might have some time during that hour, I plan on sending the survey out next Wednesday morning.  I have also considered offering cookies as a bribe for completing the survey.

It may also be difficult to generalize from the data what factors encourage SLMS-teacher collaboration.   My subjects are complex individuals who are unique in lots of ways (age, gender, length of career, past experiences, attitudes, etc.) while my survey, though reliable and consistent, is short, simple, and has a lot of multiple choice questions.  I may not get the depth of answers that will allow me to truly find out what is going on.  To combat this, I added the option of filling in"other" boxes on many of my questions, and did add a few short answer boxes as well.  I am hoping that the combination of multiple choice and short answer will result in the appropriate depth for a pilot study.

Another pitfall of qualitative studies is the transferability of the results to other situations.  Because I am doing a local study of one high school with unique characteristics, the findings may not be applicable to other high schools even within my own district.  In my discussion of findings, I will need to be sure to include demographic information about my school so others can determine if their situations are similar enough to consider the findings useful for them.