What Underachieving
Middle School Students
Believe Motivates them to Learn
Middle School Students
Believe Motivates them to Learn
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Middle School Students Believe Motivates them to Learn |
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Chapter 1: The Challenge to Educate Everyone Chapter 2: A Review of Literature Chapter 3: Methods
Chapter 4: The Results Chapter 5: Discussion |
The goal of analysis was to discover common themes in what seems to motivate these underachieving students, to organize this information, and to build a richer theory about what motivates this population. The data from the interviews and observations was printed with large margins, then read multiple times, coding openly (Strauss & Corbin, 1990; Glesne & Peshkin, 1992; and Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). Based on their interest in the research question, eight undergraduate Education majors, all juniors and seniors taking one of their last Education courses before student teaching, volunteered to be research assistants for this study. They were trained in issues of confidentiality and in coding transcripts and field observations. Data from interviews and observations was analyzed independently by several research assistants and myself, providing another layer of confidence in the findings (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Glesne & Peshkin, 1992). In addition to adding to the trustworthiness of the conclusions, these added measures helped to produce a fuller understanding of the motivational phenomena being studied (Bogdan and Biklen, 1998). We used the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss, 1987) to independently analyze the data from the interviews and observations. Special attention was given to the participants' personal perceptions of what motivates students to learn. Lines and paragraphs received as many codes as were suggested by their content. New codes were developed as themes emerged from the data. Throughout analysis, each researcher was alert to their own biases, repeatedly asking him or herself, "Is this what they meant? Can I back it up from the interview transcript or from my observational field notes?" In addition to myself, between five and eight research assistants coded each student interview, and three research assistants coded the teacher interviews and classroom observations. Final coding of each transcript or observation was arrived at by consensus with myself, as the lead researcher, and all the research assistants who had also coded that particular document (Glesne & Peshkin, 1992; Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). To synthesize the results, two charts were made summarizing the interviews by question asked. One chart was for the student interviews, the other for teacher interviews. Next, passages from interviews and classroom observation field notes were organized by their codes (Strauss & Corbin, 1990; Glesne & Peshkin, 1992; and Bogdan & Biklen, 1998) and appropriate aspirations survey data was added to categories. Frequency tables were used from the Aspirations Benchmarks Initiative survey results. Ones and 2s (strongly agree and agree) and 4s and 5s (disagree and strongly disagree) were each collapsed into a single frequency category. Conclusions were drawn by reflectively examining patterns in the synthesized data (Strauss & Corbin, 1990; Glesne & Peshkin, 1992; and Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). Chapter 4 presents these results. |
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Send questions or comments to wilder@somtel.com Last updated April 25, 2001 |
Assistant Professor of Education University of Maine at Farmington 104 Main Street Farmington, ME 04938 207.778.7179 wilder@somtel.com http://violet.umf.maine.edu/~mmuir |