Methodology
Participants
In designing this study the researcher will identify participants by contacting the hiring office of the school system in which they are employed. The researcher will then get a list of newly hired elementary school teachers and contact them via email and phone calls. These participants will be within six months of graduating from a teacher education program. They will be geographically located in a Northeast Georgia metropolitan school district. The participants will be between the ages of 21 and 29. There will be no particular preference for gender or race. By obtaining participants that have been newly hired the researcher is able to obtain a realistic comparison between information that has been learned during an undergraduate program versus the information gained by hands on experience and the feelings held by the participants.
Research Questions
1. How prepared do preservice and first year teachers feel about teaching reading to elementary school students?
2. What are the factors that contribute to the feelings of preparedness or unpreparedness for preservice and first year teachers?
Procedures
In order to answer the research questions the researcher must first identify the participants that are to be involved and also determine the type of research that will be most beneficial and informative. The researcher will determine that the grounded theory will be the best strategy of inquiry. The grounded theory is the most encompassing strategy because it allows the researcher to generate or discover a theory. The value of the grounded theory lines in its ability not only to generate the theory but also to ground that theory in data (Strasuss and Corbin,1998).
According to Scott and Howell (2008) the researcher constructs theory from the data. By starting with data from the lived experience of the research participants, the researchers can, from the beginning, attend to how they construct their worlds. That lived experience shapes the researcher’s approach to data collection and analysis. Although this method is a little abstract it allows the researcher to discover and produce new questions and data to base the proposed theory on.
This theory is the most appropriate for the research project for the reason that it allows for the exploration of different avenues. The grounded research theory begins with a supposed conclusion but as the participants become more involved there could be underlying information that surfaces that might have the ability to totally turn the theory around in another direction.
Data Collection Procedures
The main mode of data collection will be interviews. The interviews will be conducted over a time period of about one month. Once participants have been secured the researcher will determine the best location for interviews i.e. school classroom, home, library, etc. Participants will be asked pre-determined open-ended questions. By using open-ended questions more information is gathered and more probing questions might surface. Information will be recorded with a tape recorder then transcribed to obtain accuracy.
Although interviews have some weaknesses, for the proposed research it seems to be the most efficient in gathering data and allowing participants to thoroughly answer questions. Some of the strengths of interviews are that they are useful when the participants cannot be directly observed and interview also allows the researcher control over the line of questioning. However, some weaknesses that have been documented are that interviews take the participant out of their natural setting and that the researcher might bias responses. Of course any research can be skewed but interviews are open to a lot more interpretation.
Data Recording Procedure
By using Creswell as a guide for recording data the researcher will conduct structured but open-ended interviews using transcribed audio recordings and interview notes. These notes and recordings will be analyzed and coded to transfer information into readable data.
