Teacher Resource Centre
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Research Methods: Developing your research design
This MESHGuide is designed to provide teachers with practical strategies to develop interesting and relevant research questions and to formulate a research design to engage in research-informed practice in their school or setting.
This MESHGuide draws on a range of key literature in the field of social science research, and it has been informed by lessons learned from the author's research. The guide aims to help teachers to:
- understand the purpose of a research design
- understand the significance of formulating a research question
- develop the initial focus of your research by exploring different potential starting points for this
- understand different ways of categorising research questions
- identify the characteristics of good research questions and apply these in practice
- develop and evaluate your own research questions
- operationalize your research aim so that you can develop appropriate research tools to answer your research questions by developing question-method connections in your own research
- improve your research data through understanding the nature of validity and reliability and exploration factors that could impact on these
Research Methods: Doing a literature review
This guide is designed to help teachers to:
- understand how to use other people’s writing to inform their own research;
- develop a strategy for carrying out a search of the literature;
- organise the themes logically;
- evaluate the research they read;
- think about the features of a reflective literature review and explore how to achieve this in practice
This MESHGuide draws on a range of key literature in the field of social science research. Also its design has been informed by lessons learned from the author's research, which has focused on the following areas:
- developing effective collaborative learning in science
- factors influencing learning through play in the early years
- student teachers’ engagement with research and its impact on their developing practice
- constructivist informed practice in science within initial teacher education
- creativity in learning and teaching.
Research Methods- Considering Ethics in your research
This MESHGuide draws on a range of key literature in the field of social science research ethics. It is designed to help teachers to:
- Understand the significance of ethical concerns in the research process
- Identify the nature of the ethical issues that may be of significance in the design and implementation of their research
- Develop their research design in a way that takes into account ethical considerations, so that their research is as ethical as possible
- Understand the complexity of the process of gaining informed consent and enable them to achieve this
- Reflect on the complexity of research ethics
Mathematics lesson starters for Grade 3 learners
A set of teacher guides containing each 6 Mental Mathematics Lesson Starter units for Grade 3 learners, in alignment with the South African curriculum. A different calculation strategy is in focus in each unit. These calculation strategies are taken from the curriculum. Each unit covers a particular group of connected skills, and the aim is to move learners on from counting in ones on their fingers or with tally marks on paper.
Each unit is three weeks long; it begins and ends with a short test for the learners. Marking these tests provides information for the teacher and the learners about how much they have improved in using that particular set of skills during the three weeks. Within each unit, the focus is on three types of calculations: fluency, strategic calculating and strategic thinking.
Working through the Lesson Starters in each unit should lead to improvements in learners’ performance from the pre to post-tests. These improvements show progress in mental mathematics skills and number sense.
The guide is available in 11 official languages of South Africa.
