nvivo in educational research two examples from new mexico
TRANSCRIPT
NVivo in Education Research
Two Examples from New Mexico
April 16, 2015
Introduction
• To illustrate the use of NVivo in education research by highlighting its application in two recent projects conducted in New Mexico
The Projects:
Co-Teaching Collaborative Schools Initiative
CNM Faculty Evaluation Survey Analysis
What it isA model for teacher training. The method depends heavily on a mentorship arrangement whereby a student teacher, known as a teacher candidate, works with an experienced teacher, known as a co-operating teacher, from the collaborating school and an embedded faculty member from the college of education over a three-semester period. The cooperating teacher serves as a mentor for the teacher candidate providing guidance in skill development, co-teaching strategies and enculturation into the school community. The embedded faculty member provides a presence at the school to help mitigate any issues or conflicts that may arise in relation to the program operations and provides additional support for the teacher candidates.
Co-Teaching Collaborative Schools Initiative
Data SourcesFor this project, there were a number of data sources including: student level quantitative data collected from the district; weekly monitoring data submitted by each of the teacher candidates; and guided discussion group transcripts.
Co-Teaching Collaborative Schools Initiative
ChallengesA challenge worth discussing surrounds the transcripts. Because the discussion groups were held in school buildings it was not uncommon for bells to interrupt the exchanges and actually overwhelm and drown out what the participants were addressing. While this did not happen with great regularity, when it did it was frustrating to have the narrative disrupted or drowned out and thus make part of the text useless.
Another challenge relates to the transcripts and the way that the discussion groups functioned. In their enthusiasm to get their point across, at times some participants would talk across each other, thus resulting in a very choppy transcript copy. I overcame this issue by “over highlighting” text that was dropped into a node. I would have to wait for downloading the node reports into a Word document then stripping out the various streams of narrative by participant and restringing these together. When these coding issues arose they tended to eat up a fair amount of time.
Co-Teaching Collaborative Schools Initiative
CNM Faculty Evaluation Survey
What it isCNM is the acronym for the Community College of New Mexico located in Albuquerque, NM. It provides several different training and certificate programs as well as awarding an associate’s degree in various disciplines. At the time of the administration of the survey, the school faculty was comprised of a total of 320 full-time and 730 part-time faculty. In the spring of 2014, the school’s faculty senate conducted a survey comprised of 6 questions for full-time and 5 questions for part-time faculty to collect input on the faculty evaluation system. The response rate from full-time faculty was 96 or ~30% and 188 for part-time or roughly 25.8%.
CNM Faculty Evaluation Survey
Data SourcesMembers of the CNM Faculty Senate were the ones that comprised the questions and administered the survey via Survey Monkey. Faculty members received a series of emails requesting they complete the survey and after a set period the survey was shut down and the data downloaded. In both surveys, the first question requested that respondents rank in order a series of 6 elements the Senate identified as applying to the evaluation process for each of the two faculty groups. After answering this one, the faculty then responded to a set of questions that addressed each of the previously ordered items. The full-time faculty received one additional question that addressed their perspective on separate teaching and professional review cycles that was not applicable to part-time faculty.
While the first question resulted in the production of quantitative data, which was analyzed in Excel, the remaining questions produced open-ended responses. It was with these where I applied NVivo in the evaluation.
CNM Faculty Evaluation Survey
ChallengesFor this particular project, the challenge was tied to the variance in responses made by the faculty to each of the questions. While there was a high enough degree of consistency in responses that allowed for coding across a handful of nodes, a sufficient number faculty responded in ways that resulted in the creation of one or two response nodes. To deal with these smaller item nodes, the decision was made to establish a three-item threshold to report a response category in the response graphs.
CNM Faculty Evaluation Survey
Presenter:
Scott D. Hughes, PhD
University of New Mexico Center for Education Policy Research