So - for the next few weeks on a Monday we will start putting together some 20 mark plans.  There is a list below of possible methods and possible areas these may be applied to.  All I want you to do in the time left today is choose 1 method and 2 or more topics  you are MOST confident with and brainstorm what may be the advantages and disadvantages of using this method to investigate this area.  Don't panic at this point, this is just an introduction and we will start to go through plans together next Monday.  

Methods in Context- Here you need to be able to assess the strengths and limitations of using any method to research any topic within education.

The different methods you need to be able to consider include –

1. Secondary documents
2. Official statistics
3. Lab/ field experiments
4. Questionnaires
5. Interviews
6. Participant observation (overt and covert)
7. Non participant observation (overt and covert)

Some of the different topics within education you might be asked to consider include

• Researching how the values, attitudes, and aspirations of parents contribute to the achievement of certain groups of children
• Why boys are more likely to be excluded than girls
• Why white working class boys underachieve
• Exploring whether teachers have ‘ideal pupils’ – whether they label certain groups of pupils favourably!
• Looking at whether the curriculum is ethnocentric (racist/ homophobic)
• Exploring the extent to which sexist ‘bullying’ disadvantageous children
• Examining how ‘gender identities’ enhance or hinder children’s ability to learn
• Assessing the relative importance of cultural deprivation versus material deprivation in explaining underachievement
• Assessing the success of policies aimed to improve achievement such as ‘employing more black teachers’.

The above isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a start.

A useful activity is to pick one method and go through 2 or more of the topics, stating how you might use the method to research the topic, and what SPECIFIC advantages are and what SPECIFIC problems you might face.

For example:

Structured questionnaires would be a good method to research the values and attitudes of parents and how these affect achievement, because this is a relatively simple topic, and it would be quite easy to operationalise and measure how long parents spend helping with homework, or whether they want their child to go to university. However, a problem is that if parents aren’t that interested in their children’s education, they wouldn’t bother to fill in a questionnaire.

Structured questionnaires would be a bad method to research ‘gender identities’, especially from a postmodernist perspective, because gender identities are quite complex, and ‘played out’ within groups. It would be an especially bad method to use to explore the gender-identities of groups of boys – ‘lads’ are unlikely to take structured questionnaires seriously, as if one member of a laddish subculture completed it, he would be ridiculed by the group for doing so.

The above two sentences are examples of ‘top band’ (17-20) statements – they relate an aspect of the method to the topic.

You need to include good knowledge and evaluation of the method in addition to a number of such question-specific-statements, ideally developed even further, to get into the top mark band.