Pre-post theme 6

For the first part of this theme I chose a paper from the journal Computers and Educations (impact factor ~2.5) the articles title is Effectiveness of a Mobile Plant Learning System in a science curriculum in Taiwanese elementary education. (Huang, Lin, & Cheng, 2010) The article is investigating the efficiency of a Mobile Plant Learning System used in a botany course. When the students were out in the field they could get information about plants in their PDAs. In the study they are using both quantitative and qualitative methods. They are used questionnaires with Likert scales to measure the quantitative data and interviews to get more diversified opinions about their experiences of using the PDAs. I think the combined usage of both quantitative and qualitative methods is a good way to conduct a study like this. Because it will be able to investigate many aspects. Especially I think the qualitative part of the study can enrich the quantitative data with deeper understandings of why they got a certain results. They can also help you to not miss crucial parts on the subject that you might have missed in the research phase. This can then be used when constructing theory. However an approach with only qualitative data will show the opinions and feelings of only the participants without showing an overall picture. In the study I read they got quantitative data that only a third of the participants claimed that they enjoyed using the PDAs while 75% said that the interface was straight forward. Without qualitative data we can only speculate in why this distinctive difference occurred, but with it they could easily see that it was basically due to technical problems. 

I think the study seems to have used a good methodologic approach to the problem however I actually would have liked them to present more qualitative data and analyze it a bit more. They kind of only says that they have conducted interviews not how they were structured etcetera. I think many studies tend to be too focused on quantitative measurements when it in this field qualitative measures are of big importance. 

The next part in the preparation for this theme was to choose a paper that is using case study research. Case study is when you try to understand the dynamics present in a certain setting. I have chosen an article from Computers and Educations. The title is Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers (Sana, Weston, & Cepeda, 2013) and it is about the concept of multitasking on a laptop during a lecture. The study shows that participant who multitasked scored significantly lower than the one who didn’t but also that participants who were in the direct view of peers that multitasked scored lower than the ones that didn’t had a direct view. 

If we tries to use Eisenhardt (1989) description of how to construct theory from case studies. I will not cover all aspects he presents but the ones I believe is most interesting to this article. Firstly I think the authors have a good research question and indeed an interesting topic. They are investigating it in an environment where it is valid, with different data collection methods. They are both observing during the lectures, grading notes and get data from small comprehension quizzes. The quizzes were designed to address both simple and more complex question, which related to previous research about the impact of multitasking is greater on complex content. One thing they made which is really good is that they when they noticed during the first experiment that participants that didn’t multitasked were looking at other ones that did. They investigated this further in a separate experiment. This is something that Eisenhardt points out is important (flexible and opportunistic data collection methods) to take advantage of emergent themes and unique case features. In the chosen article they have made many references to other research articles that has investigated similar topics. They state that they have used a more structured method than previous research but the conclusions are similar. I think that one weakness of their structured method is that they have predefined multitasking tasks that they should complete. I could think that when you have a list of tasks to complete during the lecture you put more focus into them than you should have if you should have multitasked as regularly. I also think that the fact that they were” forced” to multitask might have influenced when during the lecture they did it. Normally they might do it when they think that the lecture was ”boring” and now they might have done it even if they felt the lecture interesting or even entertaining. In this way the conducted experiment might not represent the multitasking as it is during a real lecture.

When it comes to the measurements of the affects if peers are multitasking I think the method is better when the participants who was of interest weren’t forced to do anything. However the tasks handed out might affect the distractions caused. 

Sources

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). theme 6 Building Theories from Case Study Research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532–550. http://doi.org/10.5465/AMR.1989.4308385

Huang, Y.-M., Lin, Y.-T., & Cheng, S.-C. (2010). theme 6 Effectiveness of a Mobile Plant Learning System in a science curriculum in Taiwanese elementary education. Computers & Education, 54(1), 47–58. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.07.006

Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). theme 6 Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers and Education, 62, 24–31. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.10.003