4.8 Data collection methods 64
4.8.4 Questionnaire design and layout 66
I felt that the general layout and appearance of the questionnaire was crucial, and was an important factor in determining the return rate of my questionnaires. The layout of the questionnaire was attractive, appealing and simple to complete. I realized the need to change it, mainly because the one used for piloting the survey had not been as user-friendly.
The aim of my questionnaire was to explore two main questions viz:
1. How do we deal with the challenges of a peer-driven model?
(a) Do facilitators have opportunities to share their acquired skills?
(b) Are facilitators familiar with the team/co-facilitation technique, and can they associate it with the national critical outcome of producing citizens who can work together in teams?
(c) Do departmental officials provide teachers with the space for professional development?
(d) Do schools have policies supporting school-based professional development?
(e) How are issues of teacher professional identity addressed by the peer-driven model?
2. How does a peer-driven model provide opportunities for teacher professional development?
The four parts that made up the questionnaire for the teachers and school management teams are as follows:
Part A: BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
This section outlined the biographical details to be filled by the respondents. The biographical details consisted of the name of the school, type of school and designation of teacher, main teaching learning area, age, teaching experience in years, gender, nature of appointment, formal qualification completed, and whether or not the respondent was a member of a teaching union.
Part B: BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS OF THE FACILITATOR
○ Age
○ Gender
○ Teaching experience
○ Qualifications
Part C: TRAINING DETAILS AND REFLECTIONS ON FACILITATION o How did you become aware of ICCE training and facilitation?
o Has the exposure to ICCE contributed to your knowledge about the implementation of OBE?
o Has training contributed to your professional career?
o Has the training contributed to (a) Thinking Skills, (b) Personal Growth, (c) Values and Beliefs, (d) Better understanding of policies? (Explain)
o What challenges have you faced as a facilitator?
o Has the training contributed to changing your teaching approach and values? (Explain) o Have you had an opportunity to influence your colleagues regarding the teaching styles
acquired?
Part A: School Details
This section outlined the biographical details to be filled in by the principals. The biographical profile consisted of the name of the school, the type of school, description of the post level of the school, biographical profile of the facilitator, gender, age, formal qualification completed management experience.
Part B: Biographical details of the facilitator
Biographical profiles are normally found useful in the deeper understanding of respondent’s personal particulars in relation to qualifications. In the questionnaire I requested personal details including age, gender, qualifications and teaching experience, in order to ascertain the spread of facilitators in terms of these criteria.
Part C: Training Details and Reflections on Facilitation
This section was designed around questions that seek facilitators’ reflections on both the content, as well as the facilitation part of the training received. Except for the management type of training which is not directly linked to the subject content the teachers were exposed to, the majority of questions were mostly applied to the subject content. I must acknowledge the fact that, like most South African researchers, subject expertise for teachers has always been found to be uneven and in most cases poor, especially within the black African group of teachers. As noted earlier in this research, teacher training for the previously disadvantaged groups was inefficient leading to unqualified or under-qualified teachers.
The training teachers were exposed to at ICCE challenged in various ways the preliminary pedagogical training teachers received in their initial teacher training. They now had to work in groups and ask questions meant to challenge and encourage their reflective critical thinking skills.
They were to ask themselves and think about:
- what kind of material they had to prepare for conducting workshops for their group members
- why the chosen material was thought to be relevant to their workshops within the context of a particular Learning Area
- how the selected material was to be presented within the OBE. philosophy guidelines
- how they were going to work and plan together as teams as opposed to the individual delivery of knowledge they were trained to offer
- what type of questions they needed to ask for participants to be challenged, and to become active instead of being passive
This meant that they needed to be prepared to be open-minded, and needed to be primed to challenge and be challenged. Taylor and Vinjevold (1999) in the research report “Getting Learning Right” (a report undertaken in 1998 as part of the President’s Education Initiative (PEI) noted that teachers’ poor grasp of the knowledge structure of mathematics, science and geography acted as a major inhibition to teaching and learning these subjects, and that this was the general problem in South Africa.
In designing the questions for this section (as I later in the questionnaire asked facilitators questions demanding reflection, in-depth understanding and insight into the training process) I was constantly mindful of the possible limitations that could have originated from their initial teacher training. My thoughts were confirmed by some responses where facilitators gave minimal responses to the questions, as opposed to responses obtained from the interviews which were much more interactive. From Taylor and Vinjevold’s (1999: 161) observation of the fact that INSET programmes for teachers can have a significant impact on the quality of learning by improving their conceptual knowledge, I also had confidence in the type of in-service training they received at ICCE, and that it would make a contribution by way of addressing some of the limitations. ICCE’s emphasis also revealed that INSET programmes gave teachers confidence and the resources to engage children at more challenging levels, and to undertake more adventurous learning tasks.
- Question 1 concerns information on how the facilitators learned about the training offered.
- Question 2 concerns the year and Learning Area of training.
- Question 3 is a Likert-type question with 29 statements divided into the following themes:
- School-based INSET - Policy documents
- Teams and co-facilitation - Methodology
- Leadership skills
- Question 4 had five open-ended questions
With my involvement at the college from inception, I was able to answer the various issues, concerns and important matters which needed to be included in each of the three sub-questions. I strongly believed that the choice of a Likert-type scale was the most appropriate and the best format to elicit data by means of my questionnaire. The range of agreement and disagreement responses permitted in a Likert Scale also make the respondents feel more comfortable in indicating their position than straightforward answers such as an “agree” or “disagree”. There were several key factors which I kept in mind while designing my Likert Scale. These took the following format:
Using a single sentence with one complete idea
Keeping the various statements concise
Keeping the sentence in the present tense
Avoiding ambiguous statements
Using simple wording which could be understood by respondents
Question 3.1 indicates a Likert-type scale which was used in drawing up of Part C of the questionnaire.
Strongly agree
Agree Not sure Disagree Strongly disagree
Part D: of the final questionnaire
I believe that this type of scale was extremely useful in capturing the teachers’ and school principals’ perceptions, attitudes with regard to the influences as well as the contribution of the peer-driven model to the implementation of the OBE policy. Furthermore, it is an easy and unambiguous way for the respondents to answer questions. The experiences of school-based facilitators in respect of their training within the OBE philosophy were listed in the form of statements, one below the other. These experiences were gathered from conversations with facilitators themselves, as well as from my literature review.
Researchers like Best and Khan (1996: 181) believe that it’s not that important to worry about the correctness of the statements, as long as they clearly bring across the opinions held by a substantial number of people. I had to balance the statements between positive and negative input.
The Likert scale was used in order to ascertain the extent to which the respondents agreed or disagreed with a particular statement regarding the facilitation training offered.
For starters, I opted for clear and unambiguous instruction, which guided the respondents, for example, the idea of placing a tick (√) made the questionnaire user- friendly and easier for my respondents to complete. Graphs requiring interpretation were avoided, based on the notion that placing ticks in boxes and columns as a way of responding to a question was one which most respondents were familiar with. The technique of subdividing the questionnaires was useful. I grouped the questions in such a way that each of them dealt with a specific category.