Although problems of reliability and validity have been explored thoroughly by experimenters and other quantitative researchers, their treatment by ethnographers has been sporadic and haphazard. This article analyzes these constructs as defined and addressed by ethnographers. Issues of reliability and validity in ethnographic design are compared to their counterparts in experimental design. Threats to the credibility of ethnographic research are summarized and categorized from field study methodology. Strategies intended to enhance credibility are incorporated throughout the investigative process: study design, data collection, data analysis, and presentation of findings. Common approaches to resolving various categories of contamination are illustrated from the current literature in educational ethnography.

background

The Complexities of an urban classroom : an analysis toward a general theory of teaching /

Problems of Reliability and Validity in Ethnographic Research

This review assesses the progress made in research on teachers’ pedagogical thoughts, judgments, and decisions over the past decade and identifies areas of substantive and methodological research needed to improve the practice of teaching. Based on this research, we formulate “schema” or tentative “models” of teachers’ judgments, planning decisions, and interactive decisions. We then set forth recommendations for future research, including (1) the need to develop a taxonomy of critical teaching decisions, which link these decisions to their consequences in the classroom; (2) the need to intervene and alter teachers’ plans and decisions in our research, as well as describe them, with the goal of improving teaching; and (3) the need to link recommendations based on research to the implementation of them in practice.

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Research on Teachers’ Pedagogical Thoughts, Judgments, Decisions, and Behavior:

Like many others, we believe the observational, correlational, and experimental literature on research on teaching has been very fruitful. From observational and correlational findings, for example, we have determined that the presence of opening homework reviews in mathematics classes are associated with higher achievement. This idea was studied further by creating levels of review and using these levels as variables in experiments. Opening homework reviews were again confirmed as important. Re-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1175505

In Pursuit of the Expert Pedagogue

Neither interpretive nor process-product classroom research has foregrounded the teacher's role in the generation of knowledge about teaching. What is missing from the knowledge base for teaching, therefore, are the voices of the teachers themselves, the questions teachers ask, the ways teachers use writing and intentional talk in their work lives, and the interpretive frames teachers use to understand and improve their own classroom practices. Limiting the official knowledge base for teaching to what academics have chosen to study and write about has contributed to a number of problems, including discontinuity between what is taught in universities and what is taught in classrooms, teachers' ambivalence about the claims of academic research, and a general lack of information about classroom life from a truly emic perspective. This article proposes that teacher research has the potential to provide this perspective; however, several critical issues divide teacher research from research on teaching and mak...

Research on Teaching and Teacher Research: The Issues That Divide

1. Introduction: What Will You Find in this Book? 2. The Research Journal: Companion to the Research Process 3. Finding a Starting Point for your Own Research 4. Clarifying the Starting Point of Research 5. Data Collection 6. Data Analysis 7. Developing Action Strategies and Putting Them into Practice 8. Making Practitioners' Knowledge Public 9. Examples of Action Research Studies Published in Journals 10. Behind the Scenes: A Theoretical Foundation of Action Research

The Complexities of an urban classroom : an analysis toward a general theory of teaching /

Citations

Problems of Reliability and Validity in Ethnographic Research

Research on Teachers’ Pedagogical Thoughts, Judgments, Decisions, and Behavior:

In Pursuit of the Expert Pedagogue

Research on Teaching and Teacher Research: The Issues That Divide

Teachers investigate their work : an introduction to the methods of action research

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