Chapter 11

1. Chapter 11 Assess Research Quality

2. Multiple Sources of Data • Essential to the quality of your study is that your data are derived from multiple and varied sources and perspectives so that you can analyze your research questions from more than one data source or perspective. Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

3. Triangulation • Triangulation can include examining or triangulating of information and/or perspectives from your data, investigators, theory, and methods (Denzin, 1978). Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

4. Quadrangulation • Quadrangulation (McKernan, 1996) includes multiple participants working to coanalyze data (e.g., external researchers, participants, and project teams each working with the teacher-researcher with the goal “to make a thorough appraisal of the problem, bringing all those with a role into the evaluation process” [p. 188]). Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

5. Crystallization • A creative analytic approach to extend data gathering and validity through crystallization looking beyond “the triangle—a rigid, fixed, two-dimensional object”—and uses the metaphor of a crystal, “which combines symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, substances, transmutations, multidimensionalities, and angles of approach. . . . Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

6. Self-Study Methods and Crystallization • Self-study researchers may intertwine several self-study methods, such as personal history and arts-based, using one perhaps more prominently than the other. • The multiple angles of each method, like a crystal, may lead to a better understanding of the research. Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

7. Envision critical friends as prisms. • Unique to self-study research, critical friend perspectives are data sources that allow you to dialogue about your research sources and process to gain multiple perspectives from colleagues. Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

8. The Prism Effect • Critical friends work as the prism effect to allow you to alter your view through a different medium. • They illuminate new ideas and show you something that may be present all along but not obvious or visible to you alone. • They present alternative sides to your research. Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

9. Transparency • Self-study necessitates a disposition of openness to outside views, questions, and critique. Self-study teachers strive to make one’s practice explicit to oneself and to others. • The transparency of the research process is enhanced through the review of critical friends who ask probing questions and offer alternative perspectives and interpretations. Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

10. Validation • Critical friends play a key role in inquiring if the data collected accurately gauge what you sought to measure (i.e., validity). • Critical friends are also key in validating your assumptions and interpretations of the impact of your research on student learning. Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

11. Dialogical and Public Validity • One way to help you make sense of the extensive literature about the multiple issues of validity is to practice dialogical validity, adapted here to include critical friends, and public validity. Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

12. Exemplars • Exemplars or “concrete models of research practice” (Mishler, 1990, p. 415) in research help shift and validate emerging research paradigms. Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

13. Trustworthiness • Trustworthiness or “the degree to which we can rely on the concepts, methods, and inferences of a study, or tradition of inquiry, as the basis for our own theorizing and empirical research” (Mishler, 1990, p. 419). Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

14. Reliability • You may decide to use check coding on a coding sample with your critical friend. • When two coders working independently arrive at similar conclusions it improves the reliability and consistency of a measure. Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

15. Generalizability • Providing a rich description of the context and the research process promotes its generalizabilityto others; “generalizability is not a claim that can be made by the self-study researcher without wider interaction with colleagues. • Such interactions allow validation of experiences and ideas and, thus, self-study reports can be considered as an invitation to readers to link accounts with their own experiences” (Loughran & Northfield, 1998, p. 13). Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry

16. Class Activity • Work with your critical friend to analyze a piece of data that you bring to class. Dyad teams are encouraged to join another dyad team. • Next, practice dialogical and public validity with your critical friend and as a validation group with another dyad of critical friends using Critical Friend Inquiry 11.2. • Finally, use Critical Friend Inquiry 11.3 to review how you and your critical friend addressed the Five Foci. Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry