TERCER VIAJE AL ESCENARIO DE PP

Mercer et al. (2009) develop this linkage between quantitative and qualitative approaches, noting that both can be effective in educational settings. One commonly used quantitative tool is systematic observation. The goal is to create a typology of categories of interaction, such as speech, gesture, interruption and so on, and then count the number of instances produced by a given member of a group (such as how often they spoke). The categories can be derived either from the researcher’s own goals or by using existing categorisation systems (Mercer, 2010). The standard approach is for a transcript to be coded by at least two researchers to ensure a degree of reliability about the allocation of instances to particular categories (Underwood & Underwood, 1999). With the data organised in this way, it is then feasible to use a range of statistical techniques for correlation or regression analysis, in particular when trying to link a type of interactive behaviour to measures of effective learning (Mercer et al., 2009).

The advantages of this approach are relative speed of analysis (especially as there is no need to transcribe the material) and that the relative clarity of a classification scheme allows for comparison across classroom instances (Mercer et al., 2009). The problem, however, also lies in the latter’s rigidity. Often comments are ambiguous or serve several roles and the categories themselves can heavily influence the findings, especially if relatively broad categories such as speech, gesture, interruption, etc. are used. Fundamentally this approach runs the risk of failing to “capture the extent to which talk is mobilised towards a particular goal or the creation of shared knowledge. Used in isolation, it would effectively reduce collaborations to a-temporal ‘inventories of utterances’” (Mercer et al., 2009, p. 30). Such coding systems may be effective at capturing the level of shared interaction (i.e. is the session dominated by one student or two?) but misses the key question of just how long individuals spoke for or to what purpose.

In consequence the dominant recording and analysis style is based on a variety of qualitative methodologies (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002), each with particular strengths and weaknesses. It should be noted that for the most part these approaches focus on speech (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002) and, to a lesser extent, group interaction, but broadly these falls into the following approaches:

• Ethnography;

• Sociolinguistic analysis;

• Linguistic discourse analysis; and

• Conversation analysis/discursive psychology.

These approaches are each briefly reviewed and then attention is given to approaches that combine these different methods, or embed elements of quantitative research into an otherwise qualitative enquiry (Scholz & Tietje, 2002).

Ethnography has been used in educational research since the 1960s (Mercer et al., 2009), with the goal of capturing the entirety of a social interaction. Usually reliant on verbatim recording and transcription, ethnography tends to rely on essentially descriptive writing. The concepts used in ethnography underlie much of more modern research approaches, but for the most part, those have moved beyond the processes and concepts of ethnography as such. Sociolinguistic analysis is another field that underpins more contemporary approaches (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002), adding an explicit focus on language to the wider interest in ethnography on the social processes at play in classroom interaction. The research can be carried out using either quantitative approaches (such as counting instances of speech by gender) or qualitative approaches (with a focus on the use of words and grammatical constructs in the collaborative process). However, though useful, both approaches in their own right have rather fallen out of use (Mercer et al., 2009), having mostly been replaced by approaches grouped broadly under the concept of linguistic discourse analysis (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002).

However, discourse analysis has no clearly defined meaning (Mercer, 2010; Mercer et al., 2009) and in an educational setting has become “focused on the structural organization of classroom talk” (Mercer et al., 2009, p. 32). In this approach, a major categorisation system was developed whose focus was on who was doing the communicating (usually stressing the verbal element) and the interaction between teacher-pupil or among pupils. This focus on speech within discourse

analysis has, in turn, led to the increased adoption of socio-cultural discourse analysis

(Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002), drawing heavily on the theoretical concepts of Vygotsky’s model of developmental psychology (Mercer et al., 2009). This shows much less interest in the organisation of discourse and returns to the original focus of ethnography in looking at the social processes at play, both in setting the bounds of meaning making and in the meaning-making interaction itself. Kumpulainen and Wray (2002b) suggest that a suitable framework for recording the interaction in the classroom is then provided by three aspects: cognitive processing, social processing and language use (with the latter encompassing non-verbal communication if appropriate). This has led to an emphasis on research designs that take multimodality into account.

In practice, almost all these approaches can be used to devise a research focus and it is relatively common to find both quantitative and qualitative approaches mixed together (Mercer et al., 2009). Thus a tabular format may be devised that shows the number of instances of forms of interaction and how this varies between individuals and according to the purpose of the interaction. This contextual information may then be supplemented by more qualitative analysis of blocks of speech (or non-verbal communication) to exemplify the process and to place it in context.

A practical example of this mixing of research concepts is the common view that learning in the science classroom relies on the process of ‘thematic contextualisation’ (Mäkitalo, Jakobsson, & Säljö, 2009). What this stresses is the need to capture information both in context and in sequence as it is these two elements that offer a real insight into the nature of collaborative discourse. The gaps in interactions are also important and need to be recorded as, “observing gaps in interaction is a productive way to pinpoint the demands on students and the difficulties they run into as they learn how to reason and argue in a complex school setting” (Mäkitalo et al., 2009, p. 22). Other practical examples such as that by Arvaja et al. (2007) stress the need to see interaction as both a group process and one of personal learning. To do this meant first using qualitative content analysis to explore what each message was designed to convey in terms of knowledge or information. Then these messages were analysed for their communicative functions which were “were shaped by the socio-cultural context of the activity” (Arvaja et al., 2007, p. 450). Finally the contextual resources that were

used in the meaning making were analysed and compared to both the nature of the messages and their function.

Kumpulainen and Wray (2002) argue for a three-dimensional approach that addresses many of the issues raised above:

• Functional analysis – focus on speech and social interaction;

• Cognitive processing – focus on the learning strategies adopted and the problem-solving processes used; and

• Social processing – focus on the social relationships within the group.

Functional analysis looks at how verbal language is used both to transmit meaning and to impose a structure within a group (such as by interruption or by supporting another speaker). This approach can capture the difference between the notional meaning of words or a phrase and “what the speaker can imply, suggest or mean” (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002, p. 36). In this sense, speech is the core part of the analysis, but is not sufficient by itself to capture the range of social interaction that can be allocated to categories such as reasoning, discussion, argument and so on (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002).

Cognitive processing brings in the dimension of information processing and knowledge construction and can be allocated to one of three analytic modes (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002): procedural processing rules, interpretation or exploratory processing and task activity. The final element of their proposed three- dimensional approach, social processing, seeks to capture the social relationships within the group, with attention paid to instances of collaboration, domination and confusion. The latter in particular may reflect instances where some or all of the group are unclear about the task at hand or the meaning of a particular result.

This tripartite approach was used in this thesis as it allows a balance to be struck across all the features of multimodal meaning making. Functional analysis is embodied mainly in the multimodal analysis (Chapter 5) which allows a close study of verbal and non-verbal meaning making. Cognitive processing is also studied mainly via the multimodal analysis, but the wider issues of how the task is understood and the social constraints on meaning making and activity are themes developed using activity theory (Chapter 4). In turn, group information processing is studied using both activity theory and multimodality as analytic techniques as both allow different methods to be adopted to understand how the student group co-operated.