TD&T092 Different ways teachers value D&T

How do teachers' value D&T? and do they agree? This week I'm sharing our preliminary data analysis exploring how people value D&T.

Episode transcript

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PATT on the Edge: Technology, Innovation and Education (PATT39 Conference 2022)

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Ciaran Ellis posted a thought-provoking question on LinkedIn recently: Do design decisions involve value judgements?

What do you think? Join the conversation over on LinkedIn and let us know what you think. 

Transcript

1:10

This week, you're going to hear me possibly in the background clicking between different screens. Because I'm sort of talking on the hoof a little bit about some of the data analysis we're doing for the research project that I've got ongoing exploring the value of design and technology. Now, I want to kind of talk about this in the podcast for a number of different reasons. Firstly, because myself and my co researcher, Andrew, Dan, were looking at this data this morning. And it was like seeing all sorts of interesting things or things that we thought were interesting in the data. And I kind of wanted to voice some of that and share that with people. Because I think quite a few of you have possibly been on this process of listening to me talking about this research that we're doing, exploring the value of design and technology. And then secondly, it's to also share a little bit about how we do analysis and how we're sort of still formulating ideas and, and kind of questioning things. And we're not sure whether we're seeing stuff in the data or not. So if you're interested in research, you might be interested from that perspective. And thirdly, this is for our pap paper, that's the pupils attitude towards technology conference, which is happening in June. So we're currently writing that up. And as part of that writer, obviously, we have to analyse the data. And that's what me and Andrew were doing this morning. So those are the three reasons why I'm doing this. And because we're still exploring it, I've got to have the different spreadsheets upon the screen, and my notes in front of me, and I've got bits of paper all over the place. And so forgive me if it's kind of rambled a little bit in places, but hopefully, you'll find it interesting. So first of all, let me just give an overview about what it is that we're doing. So what we're doing is we've been developing an instrument might call it a standardised tool, or a survey, where we're asking people to rate 28 different statements that we say, are the value of design and technology that don't represent the full value of design and technology. We've gone through some other analytical processes. Before this point, we had 40 statements to begin with. And we've had people consult and give feedback. But now we've got it down to 28. And we've been asking people to complete this survey. And also give us some written feedback or not feedback, but written views about what they see the value of design and technologies. So we've got these two parts to our dataset, a quantitative numbers, and a qualitative, which is more text and word based. So that's what we're doing is we are trying to develop this tool. And the data that I'm going to talk about in this episode relates to as testing things out, so we're not still quite confident whether the survey measures what we think we want it to measure. And we're not sure whether we've got all of the things written correctly. But this is just like a printer preliminary study to help us not just get the survey, right, but also to try out some of the questions and the things that we're interested in and see if there's any other things that come up along the way. So that's what we're doing is just taking a small part of the data. So we've what we did is we had a number of different teachers complete the survey, we've had to clean the data up and we've we've got it down to 19. Some teachers didn't complete the survey. So we've left that data, we've got 19, that came from 10 different schools in England, quite a wide variety of types of schools as well. So we've got from some of the schools, more than one teachers, we've got some student teachers in the dataset as well, we've got some classroom teachers, some heads of department and some senior leaders, so they've all self identified, and how they would identify their role. We've got some males and female, we've got actually five female and 14 male. And then we've also asked people to tell us when they stopped studying design and technology, or if they even did design, study design and technology. Now the reason we've asked for that, what am I called demographic data is because we were curious, based on other research, we're kind of just seeing if what other research says about where values come from and what kind of correlates to people's values. We can see, you know, our research and the three things that were curious about is people school experience of design and technology. So did what you did at school, does that play out in how you value it? So can we see any patterns their gender, you think based on other research, that there's likely to be some differences by gender, and potentially also by school role? So that's why we've asked that that information. So I've linked in the qualitative, Andrews been doing the quantitative and we We're talking about the quantitative data this morning. Now, we took these 28 statements, and we grouped them into five different categories. I'm hoping you're still with me. And we'll publish all of this in the paper. And I'll make that available. And I'll talk about it again in the podcast. But we've we've identified some what we think are kind of quite interesting patterns. Now, we have to be careful, because what, you know, these are small groups. So the particular we look at the group of female teachers, there's only five of those you can imagine if we're starting to take averages and, and do some different things that any takes one teacher in that group to rank things quite differently to the others, it sort of shifts the data quite significantly. So we've kind of got some caution about this. But but it's an it's just kind of giving us some, some interesting things. So the first thing that we found that we think is interesting, maybe unsurprising, but we think it's interesting is that on the whole, these teachers have all given a high rating to all 28 statements. So I think, remember it, we had a scale of one to five, and so pretty much everything has been above the middle. Okay, so three, four and five, one or two have kind of been a little bit below for some people, for individuals, but generally, they've all been high. So that kind of says to us that the 28 statements, they're pretty sound people are pretty much in agreement with them. That's what our first set of data showed us that, you know, these were the 28 statements, and now we're testing it out with another and another group of teachers, and then we seem to be getting some similar, similar sort of feedback from them. But as I've just intimated, whilst, on the whole, everything is highly rated, there were some individual differences. And, and that's kind of that's where the, the interesting bit, I suppose, comes into it. So what we've played around with is when we've looked at these five categories, they're all, you know, averaging high end, the one that came out the lowest, and we're kind of talking marginally lowest was around making, which kind of wasn't that surprising to me. We've also captured information about how old people are. And I think, I'm just speculating here, we haven't looked at this in our data set that maybe people who are older, whether that's they've been in the profession for longer, or they are, later into the profession, may may value, that aspect of design and technology more than than people who are younger, don't know that. I've got no evidence for that. But we're just kind of listening to this to explore. But then the other thing that became interesting, when we start to look at this category of of making was that what we started to say, was that there was a difference between the male and the female. But what was more interesting was that when we looked at the female responses, that was the widest range of responses in terms of the rating, so if I go back to this idea that people had to rate it from of least value to most value, the female respondents kind of almost use the full spectrum that didn't quite go down as no value that kind of use the full spectrum, whereas the male respondents, it was a smaller bandwidth of variation. So that's, that's something for us to explore. Now, part of the reason why we've got this wide bandwidth with the female respondents is because as I said earlier, it's a small group. And it's only taken one to give us that wide bandwidth. And, and that is exactly the case we have. We have one of the female teachers who finished learning studying data and technology at school, when they were 14. They're a student teacher without weapons, anything in that kind of project anything particularly conclusive here, but we're thinking, Oh, that's that. That's interesting. Um, and so, yeah, so just that one has kind of made quite a difference of the bandwidth and we've only use the correct statistical language, the the standard deviation. So that's our that's our our second Two things, the first thing was is that everything was pretty much valued highly, on the whole, with the odd exception, that the making category had this difference between male and female, but particularly started to look at the female, it had this widest variant of, of scoring, with, with one in particular scoring it in terms of importance of value to her, quite, quite low. So we think there's something there to explore. I kind of wasn't too surprised about that, in a way, because I think it's in this category of making where we have the, the greatest contention and tension within design and technology community. And what I mean by that is, when I look at social media, whether it's Facebook, or Twitter, or discussion boards, or conversations, I have this idea about making things, making something that they've designed, having the opportunity to make things is is sort of kind of looked down on to an extent, by some, but by others, they see this idea, this heritage of the craft, part of design and technology has been really important. And that's where I see this the greatest tension and the dichotomy, that's the right word, this kind of separation, this extremes of view. So I'm kind of not surprised, it's gonna be really interesting. As we put the survey back out, it's still live at the moment. And we've done this with pupils to see whether there's this similar sort of variance, this great bandwidth, standard deviation of people's responses to this category, or values that relate to the idea about about making. And then the other one that kind of caught our eyes was around. Critical thinking. And what we what we noticed there, for the for the male teachers, high rated, so highly important, but with a small standard deviation, in fact, smaller than the making one. Whereas for the female teachers, highly rated again, not as high as by the male teachers. But really big bandwidth. Standard deviation, again, is a really big, comparatively big, I'm deliberately not giving out figures at the moment, because we're still, we're still exploring these, and this will come out in a published paper. And some of the things I'm saying we might, we might change our, our views on as we look, but it's kind of just interesting to, to explore. And I suppose the reason again, I'm exploring it is to kind of give this to you the listener about, well, are these differences between, you know, if you've if you've got a department where there's female teachers and male teachers, all that these nuances of differences around what you think the value of design and technology is. So those of those have been interesting. Okay, in terms of differences and variation, standard deviations. What we then started to explore was Why were we looking at teachers at this stage are not pupils. It's because because teachers are the kind of a source of the classroom teaching and delivery. And generally the largest body collective of voices that we hear talking about the value of the subjects and so we kind of get a sense that on the on the ground, so to speak, in the in the, in the place where the subject is being taught, you know, the ethos of the value of the subject is is at its strongest, its loudest, it's my vocal hasn't met greatest number of voices, I'm kind of sort of exploring, exploring with my language there, you get get the idea. So then what it got us to thinking is, we have this qualitative data that people wrote down for us as well, after they've done the survey. Why did they think what do they think the value of design and technology was? And there's some anomalies? Making actually is mentioned a lot by the 19 teachers, actually by 17 of the 19 teachers in their written responses, and we're kind of left. So what does that mean? Why, why is it not as high in the quantitative as, as the other categories are? But yet it's mentioned repeatedly by the teachers when they've been asked to type their responses. There's a lot of research out there that talks about that we say one thing and then and then we do another. And so we wondered if there was some of that going on in the survey. And people might respond to a survey in one particular way. That they that is more truthful, honest, their perception of truth. And then in the written way might feel oh, this is more exposing subconsciously, I need to alter I'm getting myself confused in the in the written might might think I need to say or it's not, it's not come out strongly enough in the in the surveys, I want to write it I need to get my point across. And then that leads on to well, what what would we see in the classroom in terms of if we if these teachers invited us to go and watch them teach otter look at schemes of work or talk to pupils in the class. And we have got data from pupils in their schools as well for us to analyse, Are there similarities to the because we know the research says as well that the the values we have are influenced from a younger, particularly by those in authority. And so for pupils, the DN T teachers, the parents, senior leaders in schools are up, you know, school form tutors and Sajha are the authority. And so we're kind of interested about whether there's a relationship between what those authorities say the value of design and technologies and what the what the children say. So that goes back to my idea about thinking about the ethos of the values that's happening in, in classrooms. So there's kind of quite a lot going on there. And that's just been really excited to get that just from 19 responses, which, as I've said, already, we can't make any great claims, or draw any fantastic conclusions, but we can start to speculate. And then just finally, the other interesting thing, and that came out in the qualitative responses, the written responses, is that on the whole, what people wrote matched with our five categories, we were able to think, oh, yeah, that relates to making Oh, yeah, that relates to critical thinking, and so on. But there were a number of statements, things about 15 statements that didn't fit. But actually, we were able to group them into three different groups. And those groups were in our original 40 statements. So what we're sort of speculating is that these three categories that weren't in the survey, that's not part of the five, these are more of an individual concern that are not shared by everybody, but are still important to these individuals. So which is why we think we will continue to ask people in the survey to not just do the survey, the tool, use the tool in the instrument, but also to give them space to give written responses. So that the space to, you know, say other things that are of individual concern, they don't feel it's been recognised already in the survey. So that's kind of where we're at, I'm probably going to use some of the transcript from this episode to play around with for the for the journal article for the paper. And I'm kind of being a bit cagey in places because we need to we need to publish. You know, this is still speculative, it's come to the health warning. There's, there's progress to be made. But hopefully, you found that interesting, I find it fascinating to kind of go through it again, to look at the data to look at the analysis to kind of confirm some things in my mind. And from the conversation I had with Andrew this morning, I'll continue to share, I'll continue to update. And I think he's going to get really excited when we start to move to look onto the pupils data as well and then do a comparison with the teachers. So as ever, thanks very much for listening, I hope you've enjoyed that. I hope you've got something from that that's something for you to use working in the school, going to departments and discussing. Or it's just added to your thinking about how and why do we value designer technology all of us in in different ways with different potential reasons why we do and potential outcomes and behaviours that we have because of those values. So if you've got any feedback, any comments, just drop me an email. You can find me on Twitter, the usual places at tardy underscore Allison, you can drop me an email via my website, Dr. Alison hardy.com. If you liked the podcast, please do consider leaving a rating and a review wherever you find your podcasts. I have promised I'm going to read some of those outs. I'm going to start collating them, and sharing those The Good, the Bad and the Ugly world kind of depends how sensitive I'm feeling on that one. But anyway, thanks very much for listening. And thank you very much, particularly, I don't whether they'll be listening to the teachers and the 10 schools that took part in this project.