I chose to rely heavily on qualitative data because the topic of student agency involves a lot of reflection for students on how they see themselves. I thought it was important to let them describe their attributes as a learner and what motivates and/or gets in the way of their progress in their own words. Trying to come up with specific questions that could be answered with multiple choices or even a linear scale might lead them to make assumptions about “right” answers. Agency itself is difficult to measure and in many ways lies in the “eye of the beholder.” A student may feel a sense of self-efficacy but it may be difficult to observe a student exercising agency without knowing what they are thinking and feeling at the time. Similarly, I wanted to gather some qualitative data from teachers to help launch our work on developing strategies to promote agency. This allowed us to start from a place that took into consideration the collective prior knowledge of the teachers.
In the first collection of data from the students, I noticed similarities in the responses from students and I’m currently working on a color-coding system to identify patterns in the various answers from students. I’m also taking notice of some of the outlying answers to help tweak the questions for the next round as needed. I am finding as Mertler describes, gathering qualitative data “necessitates reading, rereading, rereading again” to come to understand what the trends are. I found that it took students several responses before they seemed to forget to try to say what they thought I wanted to hear. I now have my second collection of data and one of the significant changes from the first was that student answers seemed more authentic and spontaneous but they also tended to get off topic at times as well. I am anxious to look deeper for any change in their understanding of agency or their actions they’ve taken to exercise it.