While there are several topics that intrigue me that would best be served by a qualitative study, I'm a little bit concerned about how feasible they are given the brief observation period and the fact that I (all of us really) won't be able to influence the material that is covered during the fall term to "optimize" our data collection opportunity. The study of how textual irony is taught in literature would be great but would be very limited if no texts including that learning objective are taught during the fall for instance.
I love the idea of studying the impact of technology on the student writing process in general and the revision steps specifically. The nature of word processing makes it much easier for a student to skip many steps in the writing process. They can go straight to the keyboard and wail away, revising as they go, depending heavily on the spell and grammar check functions inherent to most applications. I suspect that the accessibility and reactive nature of these tools makes the writing process and revision process require less foresight, planning or deliberation. I could also imagine finding that it saves students a great deal of time on the mundane and most common revision problems (like spelling) and allows them to focus more on sentence structure, coherent and connected threads through an assignment, etc. It will be hard to conduct this type of research as a comparative study followed by observations and interviews without impacting students' work or the teacher's expectations (i.e. I can't have one group use pen and paper for assignments and compare their work and process to a group using word processors).
I'm leaning at this early point towards how a teacher uses contemporary issues in literature instruction or the use/efficacy of reader response versus text centered instruction. Both can be approached with extensive observation, interviews of both students and teachers and surveys to accomplish the aims of a qualitative study. I'm not sure how to focus the hypothesis within that broad topic yet. Unless of course I can figure a creative methodolgy to avoid the previously mentioned limiting factors. Its only June, right!?
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Ted, I think you have several interesting possibilities here. You are correct that there will be some limitations because of time and place, but you might study any topic with multiple methods. You might learn a lot by interviewing or surveying teachers or students. Good thoughts!! It is still early!
My favorite is the influence of technology on the writing process. Maybe that is because I don't conceptually understand the other potential topics. :) So you are right when you say that you cannot conduct an experiential study and examine students taking a pencil and paper test or a word processing test. But students are forced to switch back and forth between these modes all the time. Most students write their papers on home computers now but take English essay tests with paper and pencil. Even if you find a school/teacher that lets their students take tests with a word processor, then still must take the English 10th grade writing test with pencil and paper. So you could observe the differences in writing styles as the students switch back and forth between modes of writing. But all these thoughts are only useful if you pick this topic. Nice post.
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