Student motivation study: pilot number 1

In this post I’m going to outline the process I’ve been through to run a pilot of my research. This includes why I’m doing it in the first place, what I planned to do, what I did, and how it went.

Purpose of the pilot

Since my Master’s research consisted solely of questionnaire data, I hadn’t run a focus group before. As such the main focus of my pilot was basically to practise running a focus group. One of the ethical issues I identified was the potential for wasting others’ time, and making sure I know what I’m doing when it gets to the ‘real’ research is imperative in avoiding wasting time (mostly the participants’, but also my time too).

In addition, since the focus groups are in part based on SRQ-A data, this provides an opportunity to test the statements that the student participants will be responding to (including the novel statements I’ve added to the pre-validated SRQ-A).

What’s happening

A small, randomly selected, group of Year 11 students (who won’t participate in the main study) will complete the SRQ-A questionnaire. We then conducted a focus group together almost immediately.

Between the SRQ-A and the focus group, I’ll have a bit of time to look at the SRQ-A data and see how it looks, and I used this to guide a couple of the questions in the focus group.

I’ll analyse their SRQ-A data to tailor the questions for the focus group. The students didn’t miss a lesson; they’d usually have PSHE in this period, but the Y11 students are now allowed to use the time for silent revision.

What I did to prepare for the pilot

• I randomised the order of the SRQ-A statements, and have put these on a Microsoft Form, and had it randomly order the statements for each pupil
• I had a short list of questions that I wanted to ask the students during the focus group, in part based on the SRQ-A results.
• I’ve also added a couple of extra questions about the experience of the research at the end; this won’t help me with the skill of running a focus group necessarily, but it will help me check things like the SRQ-A statements make sense and are comprehensible etc.

How it went

…badly. But that’s kind of why I wanted to do a pilot study in the first place. It would have been a poor choice to not run a pilot, and then to run a focus group in the main study in the same way as this one. Realistically there wasn’t any significant or usable data (not that I was keeping pilot study data anyway), so would’ve been a waste of time.

‘What was so bad about it?’ I hear you ask. It wasn’t like a riot broke out or anything, but we didn’t use anything like as much time as I wanted, and the students didn’t talk as much as I hoped. I was looking forward to hearing discussions between students, rather than them answering my questions as a group (like a group interview).

Coming soon…

I’ll be running another pilot study, hopefully next week. Changes I’ll make:

• More students doing the questionnaire, so I can more carefully choose the focus group participants to cover a range of motivation types
• More questions about the data from the questionnaire – since at least one participant will have each motivation type, it’ll allow more detail about why they experience that type of motivation
• Use of prompts before each question in the focus group to illicit more conversation between students, so it’s not too ‘group interview-y’

Now, I’m flying off to plan Pilot 2 in more detail.