Category: Academic Research Blogs
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An outline of the findings from my study
In this post, I will outline the findings from my study. It’s a bit longer of a post since there’s a lot of data! The quantitative findings come first, addressing the Relative Autonomy Index and Target Grade Affinity Index, and their relationship. Then the qualitative findings focus on the key findings relating to students’ perspectives…
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Deduction, induction & abduction for thematic analysis
In their seminal 2006 paper, Braun & Clarke provide a step-by-step guide to thematic analysis. (I won’t outline all of the steps here, but a full reference for the paper is at the end of the post). In this post, I outline how their paper guided me in my own thematic analysis, and the different…
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Methods for investigating target grade use in English secondary schools
If you’ve read any of my previous posts about my research (such as the proposed methods poster I produced, or about some of the data I’ve collected, for example) then you may be familiar with the methods I used. In this second short post in the run-up to my viva, I’ve summarised the methods I…
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Target grades: what’s the problem?
In two weeks’ time, I will sit my viva voce (defense, for any US readers) for my EdD. I’ve not written for a while, and as part of my preparation I’ve decided to write about my thesis a bit to help distill my thinking and research, and the way I explain it. This will be…
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Learning R for quantitative analysis
As I’ve discussed before, I learned to use the R programming language (using RStudio IDE) to conduct the quantitative analysis for my EdD degree. In this post, I’ll outline how I learned what I learned, and what I used that knowledge for. All the code I wrote is viewable in the GitHub notebook found here.…
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Where am I in my EdD journey?
I know it’s been a while since I wrote about my doctoral journey. In this post I’ll summarise where I’m at so far… Previous posts on this can be found here. Data collection & analysis I completed my data collection in the summer of 2023. This included four focus groups, six psychometric testing questionnaires (three…
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Students’ views on competence and other factors affecting motivation
In this blog, I will briefly outline what students said about competence in relation to target grades and other factors. Please note that student names have been changed for anonymity. Target grades don’t match perceived competence At several points through the focus group, students identified that there was a disparity between their target grades and…
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Autonomy, time-management and homework-setting
Following coding data from focus groups according to the three main aspects of self-determination theory (as well as a few other common factors that have arisen through reading the transcript), I have started sub-coding data too. The first sub-code (under the ‘autonomy’ main code) relates to time-management and homework-setting, and I’ll outline how students from…
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Data collection round 1 – psychometric testing for motivation types
It’s finally started! On Thursday 22nd September 2022 I started the data collection phase for my main doctoral study. Since then, I have conducted a focus group (which will take far longer to analyse in any useful detail), but in this post I’ll outline some of the headline findings from the first of three psychometric…
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Lessons from Pilot 2
In a previous post, I wrote about what I learned from running a pilot study for my EdD, before the main study starts in September 2022. In a nutshell: it went terribly, and that was the best outcome I could’ve hoped for. You can read about this in a post I wrote about the first…
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