Students' conceptions of research: I - A qualitative and quantitative analysis

Relatively little is known about students' conceptions of research and, in particular, whether there are conceptually discrete patterns of variation that can be used to model this phenomenon in terms of research-as-learning outcomes. The present study explores the dimensionality of students' conceptions of research from two complementary research perspectives. The open-ended written responses of students (n = 154) to questions aimed at soliciting variations in conceptions of what research is are analysed using a qualitative methodology to isolate "categories of description". Findings are summarized in terms of eight such main categories, some of which are further internally differentiated. In terms of the main categories, research is conceived in terms of (variation in): (A) information gathering, (B) discovering the truth, (C) insightful exploration and discovery, (D) analytic and systematic enquiry, (E) incompleteness, (F) re-examining existing knowledge, (G) problem-based activity, and (H) a set of misconceptions. The substantive verbatim excerpts that formed the units of analysis in the qualitative analysis were used as a basis for item stems which were psychometrically operationalized into a Students' Conceptions of Research Inventory (SCoRI). This inventory was administered to a second heterogeneous sample of postgraduate students (n = 224) and the resultant data were subjected to exploratory factor analyses that provided empirical support (as dimensions of variation) for a smaller subset of the categories isolated in the qualitative analysis. Empirically, and in terms of additional psychometric considerations, there was support for five dimensions of variation (common factors) in terms of categories B, C, F, G, and H. These findings provide an initial conceptual basis for interpreting how students engaged in research activity may differ from one another in terms of their conceptions, as well as what the likely consequences of any such stable differences may be for research-as-learning outcome

Using Large-Scale Assessment Datasets for Research in Science and Mathematics Education: Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Large-scale assessments of student achievement provide a window into the broadly defined concepts of literacy and generate information about levels and types of student achievement in relation to some of the correlates of learning, such as student background, attitudes, and perceptions, and perhaps school and home characteristics. This paper provides an overview and outlines potential research opportunities of one such assessment—the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In order to provide examples of the work that can be accomplished with these data, we describe and discuss the results generated from PISA 2000 and PISA 2003 in terms of international comparisons of achievement and the models of relational patterns of student, home, and school characteristics. We provide insight from the recent pilot testing conducted in Taiwan for PISA 2006, which has a focus on scientific literacy. This is followed by a discussion of the implications and potentials of the 2000 and 2003 datasets to facilitate research on scientific and mathematical literacy. The paper concludes with a look ahead to PISA 2006 and what researchers should be attending to in the research reports generated from the OECD and the research interests that they could follow given access to the datasets generated