Communication Strategies of Educational Research Among Teachers: Dissemination Articles v/s. Acedemic Articles

Author(s):

Haylen Perines (presenting / submitting) F. Javier Murillo (presenting) Nina Hidalgo Farran Reyes Hernández-Castilla Cynthia Martinez Garrido

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Format:

Paper

Session Information

27 SES 09 B, Teachers Activities and Epistemologies

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-10

11:00-12:30

Room:

202.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Chantal Amade-Escot

Contribution

Within the line of research that studies the relationship between educational research and practice (Dagenais et al., 2012; Hargreaves, 1996; Kaestle, 1993; Spiel y Strohmeier, 2012; Thomas y Pring, 2004; Vanderline y van Braak, 2010), there are articles specifically focused on how teachers perceive and use educational research (Beycioglu, Ozer, y Ugurlu, 2010).

Some studies approach how teachers feel research articles (Bartels, 2003; Gore y Gitlin, 2004; Hemsley-Brown y Sharp, 2004; Latham, 1993; McDonough y McDonough, 1990; Shkedi, 1998; Zeuli, 1994). Everyone agrees that teachers have a critical perception about research and articles with three essential arguments (Murillo, 2011): a) research is perceived as highly theoretical b) it has difficulty understanding vocabulary and statistics; and c) and, they are suspicious of research results.

Teachers believe that the knowledge that research shown in the articles is extremely theoretical. For example, Shkedi (1998) did a qualitative study in which he interviewed 47 teachers from different educational levels. The results were conclusive: most of them do not read research articles because they think they are irrelevant and too theoretical. In this sense, the study of McDonald, Badger & Whites (2001) reports that teachers reject the articles by the difficulty in applying the results to their practice. Bartels (2003) arrives to the same conclusion: the teachers doubt about the incorporation of the results of their job, because they understand them useless. The second difficulty is the technical language used in the articles. This is reflected in the works of Lathan (1993), Bartels (2003), Zeuli, (1994) and Hemsley-Brown and Sharp (2004). Bartels (2003), argues that teachers prefer the articles written in a clear, brief and personal style.

In other hand, the teacher rejection towards research and its results (Shkedi, 1998). Teachers doubt about the empirical evidence and they use the experience to validate their knowledge (Zeuli, 1994). Bartels (2003) in their research notes that for researchers validity of the articles is established according to the empirical evidence that can be extrapolated to other contexts. Teachers disagree, because they feel that the results cannot be generalized in all educational contexts. Studies about the perceptions of teachers on research and research articles have used different methodological approaches: surveys, semi-structured interviews and focus groups (Hemsley-Brown and Sharp, 2004). However, there are two "classic" works with an interesting approach: Zeuli (1994) and Bartels (2003). In both cases a group of teachers read various research articles, and then were interviewed. This methodological approach has been followed in this work.

The objective is to determine the perceptions that teachers have towards two research articles, one of dissemination and other more academic.

Method

Two educational research articles were delivered to a heterogeneous group of 20 non-university teachers. One, more academic and the other dissemination, but both focused on a similar topic. The first article: "Prediction of Success in Teamwork of Secondary Students" (Monereo, Castelló Martínez-Fernández, 2013), was published in volume 18 (2), 2013 of the Journal of Psychodidactic. It has 20 pages and its structure is a typical empirical research article with a significant use of tables and statistical analysis. The selection criteria was based on the quality, a Spanish journal of educational research with the highest impact according to the Institute for Scientific Information -ISI- (2.67). The second is titled: "Interactive Groups: heterogeneity and optimization of the resource" (Martin & Ortoll, 2012), was published in issue 429 of 2012 of Cuadernos de Pedagogía. It has 3 pages, contains figures and has typography with colour illustrations. After delivering the articles to teachers, a 30 minutes interview was conducted. A formulated open questions were asked, not skewed the responses. The questions concerned were about: i) perceptions about dissemination article, ii) perceptions of the "more academic" article and iii) perceptions of educational research and its usefulness. The twenty non-university teachers were selected through a non-probability sampling with quotas with the following criteria: level education (primary and secondary), and to be or not initiated in educational research. With initiated teachers are those who have attended or are attending a master degree. Eleven are female and nine male, and all have 10 or more years of teaching experience. After transcribing the interview was performed the analysis process by coding, categorizing and elaboration of semantic families was performed. The ideas of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) are followed by open systems of categories that allowed select the most relevant citations. At the same time, it has been possible to determine previous categories from the theoretical framework. A hierarchical system category has been identifying as the most relevant. The items were hierarchical grouped in families that allowed to organizing and writing the results. A deductive an inductive coding system has been followed supported with Atlas.Ti6 program.

Expected Outcomes

The valuations of both articles are predominantly critical. In the case of dissemination article there are two different opinions. While some teachers find it very useful and interesting, others criticized for over-simplify reality and not provide useful information. The first opinion is mostly defended by teachers in primary education, independently of their initiation into research. However, we also find critical about the journal format, the colour, the illustrations and short bibliography were criticized elements because infantilizing information. In the academic article, the language is difficult to understand because it is highly specialized and statistician. It is striking that some teachers consider that the bibliographic citations prevent fluent reading. Also the question about usefulness matter of the article because although it is an interesting topic does not provide elements that can be used in their classes. Summarising the perceptions, we appreciate that teachers positively value both articles the topic because they like to read what they do almost intuitively objectively explained through a study. However, they have a different glance when asked about the article usefulness because they think that the texts are not clearly exemplify how to introduce the information into their classes. Differences in teachers’ perceptions have been shown according to the level of research initiation and education level; and those are rare and mostly kept higher rejection by Secondary Teachers about dissemination article.

References

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