Do you agree that data analyzis is efficient in exploring students’ behavior?

Whilst I was carrying out my action research, I made changes to my teaching practice and the way that I used the PPPB questioning technique as the three week research period progressed. This resulted in a variation in the volume of data collected at each stage and this has had an impact on the way that the data can be interpreted.

I planned to collect data for every question asked when I was addressing the whole class. For the first two lessons, there was a large number of questions and data collected. I found that PPPB questioning was very time consuming and so adapted the technique by focusing the points at which I wanted to use it. This meant far fewer data was collected in subsequent lessons and it has made it difficult to make comparisons between the data collected in earlier lessons.

Data analyzis is useful for exploring connections such as that between the lessons in which the pupils’ thinking time was longer and the volume of higher order responses that were developed. This quantitative data is helpful to illustrate the effects of the PPPB questioning strategy, however it was in listening to the actual responses provided by the pupils and being part of the process of exploring their understanding that the true extent of the effectiveness of the strategy was witnessed.

What the data analyzis does not show are the qualitative finding of my action research, the quality of the in-depth responses, the level of understanding and the drawing out of misconceptions that the PPPB technique facilitated. My class explained and articulated key differences between sets of calculations and explored how they would create formulas using only some key information.