Alayne Armstrong’s (2005) paper, Group flow in small groups of middle school mathematics students, aims to explore the characteristics of group flow and the condition that might help to promote the experience of it by conducting class observation in middle school mathematics classroom. The finding revealed that a group is more likely to develop group flow, or in other words, develop and maintain a collective zone of proximal development where idea emerges when the condition for the collective learning system is present.
When reading this article, I found that in the introduction part the author stated the background information and her personal research interest using first-person narrator and a story-telling way. This is very different from the previous research papers I read that normally introduce social and theoretical background in an objective manner, but actually intriguing to readers to a great extent as I felt engaged in the author’s life experience. It reminds me of our guest speaker Doctor Ihnatovych’s words which I totally agree that using stories as the introduction is a very innovative way and can raise readers’ interests as well as make the readers feel close to the author.
I also learned a lot from the literature review that I can see was organized in a way from general to specific, which makes it more accessible to readers especially those who have little knowledge of this field. For example, some broad concepts like reflective relationship between students and sharing mathematics thinking were mentioned first and then group flow in classroom was introduced at last. In addition, in order to achieve “from general to specific”, the author split the words and concepts in the title and analyzed them one by one. For instance, she reviewed studies about flow theory and classroom groups separately, after which she combined the two concepts and reviewed flow in classroom groups.
One more interesting thing is that the author did not use triangulation in her research methodology (class observation is the only method she used in her study). I wondered what the possible reason might be for her not using another method to ensure the reliability of her findings.
Good morning, Yuxi,
ReplyDeleteI agree that the personal narrative is a more interesting way to get the reader's attention than by the usual academic, scholarly was we are used to. Perhaps this is something that is going to be more common. That the articles were presented in "general to specific" was also something I think is unusual...there are many ways that we can present our papers and I appreciate that we have been given a variety of papers that give us something to reflect on as we may or may not decide to do research ourselves. Cheers, Jennette
Hi YuXi,
ReplyDeleteI must admit I had some trouble with the concept of “group flow” as I hadn’t come across it before, but it seems like a really interesting idea to look into working with a class as a collective rather than as individuals; particularly where class sizes are large. Armstrong is sort of looking for the “holy grail” of teaching where the entire class can be motivated, engaged, and performing at the peak of their abilities. In my experience, though this happens sometimes, it is a lot less common than teachers would like. Your observation of the writing style being personal, and so engaging, is also something I’d imagine that happens less often than writers would aim for! I like how you were able to pick up on the lack of triangulation in the research methodology; as you say, It would be helpful if the data could be verified through some kind of cross verification. I wonder if having a co-researcher’s observations to compare her own to would have allowed for this. What other strategies could be used to triangulate this kind of data?
Very interesting conversation! Yuxi, very perceptive of you to notice that there was no triangulation here. I like Kieran's idea of having a co-researcher participate in the study to offer another point of view on the research. There would have been other ways to triangulate too-- for example, by eliciting student reflections on their degree of engagement and 'flow' during the lesson.
ReplyDeleteThank you Susan! I can see that in qualitative studies, researchers really like to use observation and interview as triangulation. It's good to know that written reflection can be another way of triangulation!
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