Restatement of research problem: Are first year teacher adequately prepared to teach classrooms with technology?
1) Non probability sampling- I think the best option for me to use would be this one. I would use a convenience sampling. To do this, I would propose that VCU add questions about technology preparedness to their first year teacher survey. This survey is reached to all graduates one year after they graduate from VCU. In order to find out how many surveys are normally returned, I would have to get in contact with the people who give out this survey every year. After the surveys were returned, I would look at the responses, to get a percentage of the teachers that felt prepared to teach with technology. I would also like to take a look at open ended questions, such as what was the biggest thing you thought your education lacked? What type of technology do you feel you need to learn more about to feel more adequately prepared for the classroom? The pros of this would be the convience of it and the number of potential responses. The con would be finding a way to get VCU to add questions like this to their survey.
2) Non probability sampling- Purposeful sampling In this type of sampling I would use the students that I know are graduating with me and pass out surveys to them after one year, through email contacts. I would hope that most of them would respond because they know me and would want to for me. However, I think that could be a con of this type of sampling because it would be a smaller group participating and people may feel they need to please me in their anwsers to the questions. The pro would be getting into contact with people would be easy because of the use of email. I could even post the questions online for them to respond to or email their response back to me.
3) Probability sampling- Systematic Sampling- To do this study I would find a list of the students that graduated one year ago. Then I would pick a random number and go down the list with that number in order to find participants. However, I do not think this is a good idea because I will not have as many participants, as I potentially could. I do not think this is a good sampling technique for me at all because there is a very limited amount of first year teachers that I could gain access to her at VCU.
4) Probability sampling- Random sampling-I could enter the aforementioned list into a computer and allow it to pick the participants. But again I think I will come down with the same problem of not having enough participants because of the limited amount of potential participants.
Few thoughts
ReplyDelete1 - Your research question asks about the first year teacher's preparedness for technology use. However, all of your sampling techniques are looking specifically with the population of VCU graduates. Either you need to change your question to reflect this VCU focus or you need to think about other approaches to this question (e.g. surveying currently practicing teachers that might represent a range of different preparation programs).
2 – Although convenience sampling is used frequently it is never the best option. It is simply the easiest or most feasible. It has a lot of cons to it. Try imagining a sampling technique that has more of a deliberate purpose to it.
3 – With the probability techniques you say that neither would give a sample size big enough. Any sample size would be as big as you choose it to be. However, if you are only going to sample within the population of VCU students, you are only allowing yourself to generalize to that population.
4 – Considering your question, I would suggest some purposeful sampling of early career teachers (1 or 2nd year). You would want to sample in a way that brought together a range of perspectives on the issue.