Starting Research on Blended Learning Feedback

Taken from http://www.panalytical.com/Research-education.htm

Starting Research on Blended Learning Feedback

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Saturday, February 20, 2016 Post 214

In any sub-field of education, there are literature gaps and many research questions. Researchers cannot state that there is all that needs to be known regarding this discipline. The fact is that scholarly literature continue to show gaps in the way our understanding of teaching and learning processes has been developing for decades. New trends in education have brought lots of concerns, questions, doubts, hypotheses, and so on, of what we are currently doing -theoretically grounded, somehow empirically and not knowing what the real scientific explanation is-. As once clearly stated by Albert Einstein, “the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” And if we paraphrase this statement in the educational world of research we can also conceive it in terms of what we already know about learning, and how much we do not know yet about educational-learning processes.

“How can peer assessment in blended learning scenarios benefit language learners in public speaking and pronunciation acquisition?” is a question that presupposes that there are gaps in our understanding of how peer assessment is used in blended learning scenarios that have not yet been fully researched.

So in order to go ahead and comprehend what the state of affairs is regarding peer feedback in online learning settings, who needs to be contacted to be granted permission to carry out an educational research project? At my workplace, being this the university I currently work for and where I have been using a blended model for my courses for the last six years, the English Coordinator and the English Director need to know about this project to give the researcher the chance to go ahead with the plan: a case study in education. And if were necessary, the Dean of Education would have a say in a plan to find out how peer evaluation in virtual classroom formats is perceived by EFL students.

Though there is a “research question” to start guiding a research project, it is just a first step. “A case study approach is often the best methodology for addressing these problems (questions that emerge in our daily work life in education, my explanation) in which understanding is sought in order to improve practice” (Merriam, 1991). Several steps need to be taken to find out what can be obtained and learned from the use of peer feedback in EFL blended education settings in higher education: 

Definition of the case study with a tint of mix methodology,



Literature review to find out more about peer feedback and blended education,



Construction of a theoretical framework,



Crafting and shaping research questions,



Gathering data with the chosen data collection tools,



Data analysis, and



Data validation.

If a case study is then chosen to be carried out to find out more about peer feedback on online learning settings, “what they usually come across is the multiplicity of approaches and a contested terrain marked by a variety of perspectives� (Yazan, 2015).

But the possibility to carry them out is there for us to contribute with the knowledge in that area and look for better practices in our fields.

References Merriam, S. (1991). Case Study Research in Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publisher.

Yazan, B. (2015). Three Approaches to Case Study Methods in Education: Yin, Merriam, and Stake. The Qualitative Report, Volume 20(Number 2), 134-152. Retrieved February 13, 2016, from http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR20/2/yazan1.pdf