Starting Research on Blended Learning Feedback
By
Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano
School
of English
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Latina de Costa
Rica
Saturday,
February 20, 2016
Post
214
In any sub-field
of education, there are literature gaps and many research questions. Researchers
cannot state that there is all that needs to be known regarding this
discipline. The fact is that scholarly literature continue to show gaps in the
way our understanding of teaching and learning processes has been developing
for decades. New trends in education have brought lots of concerns, questions,
doubts, hypotheses, and so on, of what we are currently doing -theoretically
grounded, somehow empirically and not knowing what the real scientific
explanation is-. As once clearly stated by Albert Einstein, “the more I learn, the
more I realize how much I don’t know.” And if we paraphrase this statement in
the educational world of research we can also conceive it in terms of what we
already know about learning, and how much we do not know yet about
educational-learning processes.
“How can peer assessment in blended learning
scenarios benefit language learners in public speaking and pronunciation
acquisition?” is a question that presupposes that there are gaps in our
understanding of how peer assessment is used in blended learning scenarios that
have not yet been fully researched. So in order to go ahead and comprehend what
the state of affairs is regarding peer feedback in online learning settings,
who needs to be contacted to be granted permission to carry out an educational
research project? At my workplace, being this the university I currently work
for and where I have been using a blended model for my courses for the last six
years, the English Coordinator and the English Director need to know about this
project to give the researcher the chance to go ahead with the plan: a case study
in education. And if were necessary, the Dean of Education would have a say in
a plan to find out how peer evaluation in virtual classroom formats is
perceived by EFL students.
Though there is a “research question”
to start guiding a research project, it is just a first step. “A case study
approach is often the best methodology for addressing these problems (questions
that emerge in our daily work life in education, my explanation) in which understanding is sought in order to
improve practice” (Merriam, 1991) . Several steps need to be taken to find
out what can be obtained and learned from the use of peer feedback in EFL
blended education settings in higher education:
·
Definition
of the case study with a tint of mix methodology,
·
Literature
review to find out more about peer feedback and blended education,
·
Construction
of a theoretical framework,
·
Crafting
and shaping research questions,
·
Gathering
data with the chosen data collection tools,
·
Data
analysis, and
·
Data
validation.
If a case study is then chosen to
be carried out to find out more about peer feedback on online learning
settings, “what they usually come across is the multiplicity of approaches and
a contested terrain marked by a variety of perspectives” (Yazan, 2015) .
But the possibility to carry them out is there for us to contribute with the
knowledge in that area and look for better practices in our fields.
References
Merriam, S. (1991). Case Study Research in Education.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publisher.
Yazan, B. (2015). Three Approaches
to Case Study Methods in Education: Yin, Merriam, and Stake. The
Qualitative Report, Volume 20(Number 2), 134-152. Retrieved February 13,
2016, from http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR20/2/yazan1.pdf
Saturday, February 20, 2016
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