Example of the Research Design Part of a Thesis (Education)

Example of the research design part of a thesis (Education)

Example 1

The Impact of Online Peer Feedback on English as Foreign Language Learners’ Motivation in Writing and Writing Performance: A Case Study at Can Tho University (Huynh Minh Hien)

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This chapter describes the research methodology of the current study. The following aspects are addressed: (1) the participants, (2) the design, (3) the instruments used in the study to collect data of students’ motivation in reading and reading comprehension capacity, and information of students’ reading activities outside class, (4) the materials used inside and outside class during the research, and (5) the procedure of the study.

3.1Participants

The participants in the study included one teacher (the researcher) and eighty first -year students majoring in English studies at Can Tho University. All the participants are Vietnamese. The students were from two classes (coded 0654A2 and 0654A4) selected randomly among the four English studies major classes in Course 32 at CTU. There were 39 students in the control group and 41 students in the experimental group.The average age of the students in both groups was statistically similar. Table 3.1 below summarizes the number and the age of students in the two groups.

Table 3.1: Characteristics of the participants

Gender / Total cases / Age
Female / Male / Mean / SD
The Control Group
(Class A2) / 31 / 8 / 39 / 19.79 / 1.13
The Experimental group
(Class A4) / 32 / 9 / 41 / 19.73 / 0.95
Total / 63 / 17 / 80

3.2Design

The current study followed a pre-test – post-test control group design in which class A2 was randomly selected as the control group and class A4 as the experimental group. Both groups were taught with the intensive reading program. The experimental group received the treatment – extensive reading. Both groups were tested and required to answer a questionnaire before and after the study for the comparison of changes in reading performance and motivation between the subjects of the two groups.

3.3Instruments

A questionnaire was used to measure students’ motivation in reading and a reading comprehension test to measure their reading comprehension capacity. Also, students were asked to hand in their reading reports so that the teacher could check the amount of the materials they read. Another instrument was a questionnaire to get more information about the activities the students did outside class that might affect their reading comprehension, such as learning vocabulary and doing extra reading exercises.

3.3.1 The questionnaires

In order to measure students’ motivation, a questionnaire of 31 items was used. This questionnaire replicates Mori (2002)’s 30-item seven-point Likert scale questionnaire on reading motivation since the participants of the present study were Vietnamese EFL major students in university, who are to some extent similar to Mori’s participants (see Appendix A for 30 items of the questionnaire). However, the order of the 30 items was changed and one more item which is related to the characteristics of extensive reading was added. The scale was also changed into a five-degree scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree instead of a seven-point one, to make it easier for the students to answer. This five-degree Likert scale questionnaire of 31 items (see Appendix B) was piloted on the other eighty English Major students when they were in semester one. The internal consistency estimate of reliability for the piloted questionnaire was calculated and the Cronbach’s Alpha was .82. As a result, this questionnaire was used as both the pre- and post- questionnaires in the study.

Another questionnaire (see Appendix C) was applied to collect information of the students’ reading activities outside the class. This questionnaire consisted of two parts. Part I with four questions was delivered to the control group and part II with three questions was delivered to the experimental group. The first three questions in parts I and II were the same. The first question asked about how much students practiced reading aloud every week. The second question asked for the students’ approximate amount of vocabulary they learnt every week. The third question was to know whether the students practiced their reading skills by doing more reading exercises outside the textbook and how much they did that. The fourth question in part I aimed to find out whether the students in the control group did any extensive reading and if so, how much. The fourth question in part I was not included in part II because it was put in the reading report which was only distributed to the experimental group.

3.3.2 The reading report

The reading report (see Appendix D) was designed to get information on how much students in the experimental group read for ER, what materials they read, how they feel about the materials and also to make sure that students had read something or to avoid their cheating in reading extensively. This reading report included information such as the week and date a student read the material, his/her name, student code and the group he/she belongs to, the title and the number of pages of the material he had read.

There were also seven questions for more information of the student’s reading. Questions 1 and 4 “Is it easy to find the text?” and “How long did it take you to read the text?” are to know whether the student had difficulty finding and reading the materials because these may be a factors that influences the student’s motivation toward reading. Question 2 “Where did you get the text?” with some choices for the student to tick in, such as: from friends, teacher, internet, department library, school library, central library, bookstore and others aimed to get information on the source of the material. Questions 3, 5, and 6 “Why did you choose it?”, “Your feelings on the text” and “Would you introduce the text to your friend?” could help to learn more about the student’s motivation in the process of reading extensively. Finally, question 7 “Did you use the dictionary when you read?” and “How many times did you use it?” served the purpose of discovering whether the material the student read was at the student’s reading ability. If the student used the dictionary several times, this meant that the material was not at the student’s reading ability and such material might discourage the student to read.

Another part in the reading report was students’ summary of the material they read. In this part, students had to write a short summary of what they read within the week. If a student read more than one material, he had to write the summaries corresponding to the materials. Students’ summary would not be corrected but it was used mainly to assure that the students really read the materials.

3.3.3 The reading comprehension tests

Pre-test

A reading test with 50 items (see Appendix E) was designed to test students’ reading comprehension ability in both groups before conducting extensive reading. The test included two reading texts – a short text and a longer one – and six various tasks types.

The first text was of 514 words in length and was followed by four task types with 25 items. Task I including 10 items of matching words from the text and their definitions aimed at testing students’ vocabulary. Task II with five True/False items focused on the main ideas of the text. Task III with two items of supplying short answers checked students’ scanning skill. Task IV, comprising of 10 multiple-choice items, tested students’ understanding of the main idea as well as the details in the reading. The text and tasks were originally taken from Panorama – building perspective through reading (Flynn, Mackey, and Trites, 2006), except task II which was added by the researcher and task III including 2 items in which one item was redesigned from the original and the other was added. The text was an expository text. It was similar to the texts in students’ course book in terms of text type. The text topic was related to chapter 6 in the students’ course book, which is about “Cultures of the world”.

The second text was 7,216 words long and accompanied by the last two tasks of the test (task V and task VI). This text was taken from The text topic was related to the topic of chapter 9 (“Social life”) in students’ course book. Nonetheless, the text was a classical short story by Guy De Maupassant, or in other words, it was a narrative text. Therefore, it was not similar to those in the students’ course book in terms of text type. In task V, there were 10 items that tested students’ ability to guess the meaning of words from the context by tracking down the words from the text with the given meanings. Task VI was a cloze test in which students were required to fill in the summary of the text was written by the researcher and then gaps were left for the students to complete the summary (Hughes, 2003). This task consists of 15 items and it focused on students’ understanding of the general idea of the text.

Post-test

The post-test was the same as the pre-test in terms of content, task types and numbers of the tasks. In other words, it was the pre-test with a number of items rearranged. Specifically, in task I, which asked students to match the words with their definitions, the order of the definitions was changed. Additionally, in task IV of text one, the order of the answer of every item and its distracters was changed.

The pre- and post-tests were examined by four reading instructors of the English Department at CTU to check and to improve the quality of the tests in terms of instructions, content, and the appropriate level of difficulty before administered.

Scoring method

Two scoring systems were used to mark the reading tests: objective and subjective scorings. Objective scoring was applied for all tasks from I to IV in the tests. Therefore, each correct item in these tasks was scored 2 and an incorrect item was scored 0. Subjective scoring was used for task V and VI. Each correct answer in these two tasks was counted 2. 1 score was given to any answer that was acceptable in terms of comprehension but was not correct because of misspelling, using incorrect word forms such as ‘stammered’instead of ‘stammer’, using more general category word such as ‘child’ instead of ‘son’ or ‘boy’, or using incorrect grammatical structures such as ‘she married with’ instead of ‘she married’.

3.4Materials

The materials that students of both groups used were the textbook Interactions 1 Reading (4th edition) (Kirn and Hartmann, 2002), from chapter 6 to chapter 12 except chapter 11, and some related reading selections taken from Interactions one: A reading skills book (3rd edition)(Kirn & Hartmann, 1996),from some other reading books and from the Online learning center (2005) byMcGraw-Hill Higher Education available at The materials used for the experimental group to read extensively were those from fiction and non-fiction books, from newspapers and magazines in English, and from the websites provided that they were related to the topics of the six chapters in their textbook, including Cultures of the world, Health, Entertainment and the media, Social life, Customs, celebration, and holidays, and The global consumer.

Graded readers were also introduced to the experimental participants for the following reasons: (1) There were more than 100 graded readers available in the library of the English Department and in the Learning Resource Center of CTU; (2) Many experts and researchers in extensive reading (Bell, 2001; Day & Bamford, 2000; Hafiz & Tudor, 1989; Mason & Krashen, 1997; Steven, 2004; and Waring, 2001b) encouraged or used graded readers in their studies because of their benefits as reviewed in chapter 2; (3) The students were in the first year and they were at high beginner or pre-intermediate level. They had just been taught how to use the libraries and to search for information on the Internet but were not skillful enough. So, finding enough relevant materials to read was not easy for them; (4) Chapter 8 in the textbook is about media, in which part two contains some story plots. Most graded readers are simplified story. Therefore, they can satisfy the reading course requirement in terms of materials.

3.5Procedure

The time to conduct the research in the classroom was 11 weeks and the time for the students to read extensively was 10 weeks because the first week was taken to introduce the course and to administer the pretest. Following is the summary of the procedure of the present study.

Table 3.5. The procedure of the study

Time / Research Activities
1 / Week 1 / -Administering the pre-test
2 / Week 2 / -Delivering pre-test questionnaire
3 / Week 2 – 10 / -Implementing ER program
-Checking reading reports of students in experimental group
-Delivering questionnaires on reading activities outside class to both groups
4 / Week 11 / -Administering the post-test
-Delivering post-test questionnaire

Each group had two class meetings a week within five periods (see Appendix F for the schedule of reading classes for the two groups and the time of class meetings). So, in the first class meeting in week 1, the teacher introduced the course and the requirements for the students to complete the course.

The pre-test was administered in the second class meeting of the two groups within 80 minutes. The control group did the test at room 114 in A1 building on Thursday morning, March 15th, 2007 and the experimental group at room 108 in C2 building in the afternoon of the same day. In the control group, 38 students did the pre-test and 1 was absent. In the experimental group, 40 students did the pre-test and one student was absent.

In the first class meeting of week 2, the pre-questionnaire was delivered to the students of the two groups. All of 39 students of the control group answered the pre-questionnaire on Tuesday morning, March 20th, 2007, and all of 41 students of the experimental group answered the pre-questionnaire in the afternoon of the same day.

The experimental subjects started to read extensively and handed in their reading reports as well as the materials they read from week 2. The reading was done outside the class completely because of time limitation for the main reading program in class and to ensure that both groups of students had similar reading activities in the classroom. The teacher checked the students’ reading reports every week by comparing the summaries and the materials in terms of content and number of pages to make sure that the students really read the materials as they reported. Besides, the teacher used a designed format of personal evaluation (see Appendix G) to take notes on the amount of pages each student in the experimental group read, the title of the materials and even the page numbers of the materials in case the students just read some pages in one book.

The total marks of the reading course included 40% for the learning activities during the course (30% for ER and 10% for quizzes and tests) and 60% for the final exam. Experimental students were required and encouraged to read extensively by the combination of two ways. First, they were obliged to read at least 150 A4-pages for the whole semester and this reading activity was counted by 30% of the total mark of the reading course. In other words, every 5 A4-pages they read were counted 0.1 marks. Besides, if a student read more than 150 pages, they would get bonus marks. That is, for every 15 additional A4-pages a student read, he or she would get 0.1 marks added to the 10% of the marks for quizzes and tests so that finally the student could obtain the maximum mark for the 40% during the course (see Appendix H for more details).

The questionnaires used to get information about students’ reading activities outside class such as reading aloud, learning vocabulary intensively, and doing more reading skills exercises were also distributed to the students in both groups at the beginning of the first class meeting every week. The students were required to complete the questionnaire and hand it in within ten minutes after the distribution.

The post-questionnaire and the post-test were administered in week 11. The experimental group answered the questionnaire and did the test at room 108 in C2 building on Tuesday afternoon, May 22nd, 2007 and the control group at room 106 in C2 building on Saturday morning, May 26th, 2007. In the control group, two students (3079 and 3081) were absent.

The pre- and post- questionnaires and reading tests were administered in the two groups in different time and different rooms because students’ class meeting schedules were in density and different between the groups. It was impossible to arrange some periods for the two groups to meet at the same time.