I have been talking about a research project for a few months with a Robert Morgan from The University of Greenwich.
It started when we shared a car journey, and were talking about school based practice and ability groups.
We have both visited a lot of classrooms in various roles and we both thought that colours were the most common ability groups names. However, we questioned if this was just our experience, and believed that we could not make judgments based on just our view.
What if other colleagues were using inventive names?
How would we know if we did not ask?
Furthermore, what’s in a name? Is there some unconscious bias for example, around a certain colour, shape or animal?
So, our research project started.
Robert was to ask some of his departing students, what the names of the ability groups were in their placement schools, which he did and I was to look at a different sample and use social media through #AskTwitter. Robert completed his task some weeks ago, I’m starting mine today.
Both myself and Robert are research literate, Robert has worked in a University for many years and I am cofounder of @ResearchSEND, working towards a PHD, but for this research we are very much at the consumer stage of the #CUPID model (consume, use, produce, involvement & disseminate).
For blogs about #CUPID see
Michelle Haywood Blog
Our challenge if this research is going to mean something and not be an exercise in curiosity, is to move from ‘consuming’, were we have collected information from a range of classroom practitioners, have cast a ‘critical eye’ over it, and drawn our own conclusions to doing something with the information.
Our starting point may be in considering the work of Wallace and Wray, 2016 in Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates (3rd edn) around identifying the components of an argument,
An argument consists of a conclusion (comprising one or more claims that somethings is, or should be, the case) and its warranting (the justification for why the claim or claims in the conclusion should be accepted). The warranting is likely to be based on the evidence from the author’s research or professional experience, or it will draw up on others’ evidence as reported in the literature. p36
If for example, we find from our sample group that one group of ability is named prominently after one colour, we will want to triangulate this information with other sources. This could be further searching of library catalogues and reading about groups, on how they are set up and how they operate, for example.
We may not follow the #CUPID model in its linear form, but move onto produce, involvement and disseminate quite quickly, as we may find some striking results which warrant a written paper and wider dissemination.
We do however need to beware of illogical or incomplete arguments, especially if we choose to go for wider dissemination with what we find, for example drawing conclusions without evidence or insufficient warranting for the conclusion.
Wallace & Wray (2016) can help us out again here, with their ‘flaw in the argument model’, which the made up examples demonstrate,
1. Conclusion without Warranting – The Diamond group makes the most progress
2. Potential warranting without a conclusion – Attainment data from the Diamond group shows that this group makes the most progress. The School is a good school.
3. Warranting leading to an illogical conclusion – The Red group made less progress. Pupils don’t like the colour red.
4. Conclusion not explicitly linked to warranting – The wolf group are spending insufficient times on homework. The wolf group should be set more homework
5. Conclusion with inadequate warranting – Pupils learn more effectively when their group is given positive feedback. A pupil survey of year 6 pupils indicated that pupils preferred praise to criticism
This to me is where the difference may lie from consuming research and then drawing conclusions from what has been consumed, and moving our understanding further. The examples show how easy it is to make a statement (I made all these examples up!) and believe they may be research informed.
Is this what happens if we don’t read beyond the headlines of a piece of research?
I think it might.
As myself and Robert progress further with this research, we will be able to share with you our journey.
In the meantime if you would like to provide us with information on your class ability groups, we would welcome them to increase our sample size.
Please email us for more details
michelle.haywood@wlv.ac.uk
R.A.Morgan@greenwich.ac.uk
michhayw 