This study was done in three phases. Each phase was guided by a specific research question.
The three research questions were as follows:
1. How do the secondary school mathematics teachers view the strategy of teaching mathematics according to students’ learning styles?
2. How do the secondary school mathematics teachers use their knowledge of their students’ learning styles in teaching mathematics?
3. How do barriers impact on mathematics teachers’ effective use of their knowledge of their students’ learning styles when teaching mathematics?
Before carrying out the main study, a pilot study was done at one secondary school in the Makoni District of Manicaland Province in Zimbabwe. The school was not used in the main study. The purpose of the pilot study was to test the suitability of the research instruments.
The pilot study also helped the researcher to budget the time required for data collection. It gave the researcher a chance to test how the participants would react to his request for them to participate in the study. The outcome of the pilot study was that some questions on the interview guide needed to be rephrased. The questions were ambiguous. These questions were corrected accordingly. The other research instruments namely, document analysis
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checklist and observation checklist were not corrected. There were no discrepancies found on them. The researcher found that an interview session would take approximately thirty minutes.
This study was done using qualitative methods. The reasons for choosing qualitative methods are explained in the next section.
4.2.1 Qualitative research method
As stated in the preceding section, this study followed a qualitative paradigm. A qualitative research is an analysis of people’s individual or collective actions, beliefs, thoughts, views and perceptions. It is designed to understand particular social phenomena from the participants’ point of view (McMillan & Schumacher, 2010). Yin (2009) added that qualitative studies are preferred research strategies when what, how and why questions are asked. Creswell (2010) purported that the aim of qualitative research studies is to engage in research that probes for a deeper understanding of a phenomenon rather than to search for causal relationships.
In this study, the researcher sought to find what secondary school mathematics teachers knew about students’ learning styles and how they used their knowledge in teaching mathematics.
The researcher wanted to understand the teachers’ actions in terms of how they used their knowledge of students learning styles in teaching mathematics. The purpose of this study was in line with what Yin (2009) and McMillan and Schumacher (2010) stated about qualitative research.
Qualitative research method was appropriate for this study since the study was not dealing with any statistical hypotheses and procedures. This was supported by Strauss and Corbin (1998) who asserted that when no statistical procedures or other means of quantifications are used in categorizing and interpreting relevant information that has been gathered then qualitative method is used. This was supported further by Bryman (2010) when he argued that qualitative research involves the use of words rather than numbers when carrying out data analysis. For this study, the data collected was in the form of words said by the mathematics teachers; hence no numbers were used in the analysis of the data collected. The analysis was done on the words shared by the participating teachers. This made qualitative methods more suitable than any other research methods.
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The use of qualitative research methods allowed the researcher to carry out the study in a naturalistic way without setting conditions that were different from the ones that prevailed on daily basis. The data was collected while the mathematics teachers were doing their day to day business. A number of scholars supported this method of data collection (Creswell, 2014;
Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Marshall & Rossman, 2011). These scholars pointed out that qualitative method allows the researcher to holistically study a phenomenon within a natural setting in an attempt to make sense of the phenomenon. Ritchie and Lewis (2003) agreed by stressing that qualitative research is a naturalistic and interpretative approach that attempts to understand the meaning that people attach to certain actions and decisions. Golafshani(2003) concurred by saying qualitative research uses a naturalistic approach that seeks to understand a phenomenon in a context specific setting and the researcher does not attempt to manipulate the phenomenon of interest.
The current study dealt with a phenomenon that was context specific in the sense that it sought to get data from mathematics teachers from a secondary school setting and the data obtained was specifically meant for secondary school mathematics teaching. The results of the study apply specifically to secondary school mathematics teaching. In collecting the data the researcher did not attempt to manipulate the data nor the settings from where the data was obtained.
The choice of qualitative research methods was also informed by the instruments used in the study. In this study, data were collected using observations, face to face interviews and document analysis. According to Marshall and Rossman (2011), the sources of qualitative data include observation, interviews, documents and cultural materials. Fouche and Delport (2002) concured with this assertion when they say that the data collection instruments that are used with qualitative data are interviews, focus group discussions, observations, field notes, tests and pictures. They also assert that more than one of the data collection methods mentioned can be used.
4.2.2 Research design
According to Mouton (2006) a research design is a plan of how a researcher intends to conduct a study. The plan outlines the procedure to be followed by the researcher. It involves identifying a problem, formulating research questions and drawing up ways of collecting and analysing data. David and Sutton (2004) pointed out that a research design provides a
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framework for collecting and analysing data. They go on to say that it enables the researcher to examine the research problem.
This study was designed as an exploratory interpretive case study. According to Zaidah (2007) an exploratory case study seeks to investigate or explore a phenomenon of interest in a chosen field. For the current study, a case study enabled the researchers to get in-depth and detailed understanding of the mathematics teachers’ knowledge of students’ learning styles and how the teachers used the knowledge in mathematics teaching. The choice of a case study was supported by a number of scholars who argued that a case study allows for an in depth study of a phenomenon in a real life situation (Baker, 1999; Creswell, 2010; McMillan
& Schumacher, 2010; Yin, 2009). The number of mathematics teachers who participated in this study also made a case study the most suitable design. This was in line with the assertion by Welman and Kruger (2001) that a case study deals with a small number of units (individuals, groups or institutions) which are studied intensively. Thirty-four mathematics teachers participated in this study.