Studying innovation in science teaching: the use of repertory grid techniques in developing a research strategy

Summaries

English

Conventional correlation studies are of limited value in research aimed at discovering why curricula are successful or unsuccessful. Their basic weakness is that they offer little scope for revealing how and why innovations become modified in practice as a result of their interaction with contextual constraints such as teachers’ views of their own roles and purposes. Observational studies and the collection, through interviews, of participants’ accounts can to some degree remedy this deficiency. However, such methods encounter problems of subjective data interpretation and of establishing their reliability.

In a study of the implementation of an innovative science curriculum, the Schools Council Integrated Science Project (SCISP), in three English comprehensive schools, the authors experimented with the use of repertory grid techniques based on personal construct theory: This allowed interviews of teachers to be conducted in such a way that categories were revealed rather than imposed and provided data which could be subjected to conventional statistical analysis. Some factors crucially affecting curriculum innovation were identified which might not have been readily discovered by the application of either trait measurement or ethnographic methods.