Developments in quantitative methods in research into teachers and teaching

Abstract

There is perhaps no situation greater than that of teachers in classrooms where sizeable groups of people work together under the direct guidance of a single person for longer periods of a day on a regular basis and for sustained periods of time than that of teachers in primary school classrooms. In the home, the group is smaller, the guidance is shared between two and more people, the situation is similar but with longer periods of time involved where similar problems of analysis arise. Both situations present specific methodological challenges, involving multilevel and multivariate analysis. However, the size of school and classroom groups and the relative ease with which data can be collected, has led to a break-through occurring in the analysis of data in the field of education. Nevertheless, the sensitivity of teachers to intrusion into their closed operational setting has led to relatively little use being made of the advances that have occurred in these quantitative analytical procedures in the investigation of the problems associated with teachers and teaching. This article raises these issues and suggests that the developments that have occurred during recent decades in this area are opening up a domain for investigation that has the potential to spread to many other fields of societal and human activity, including industry and commerce, medical practice, and the whole of the fields of sociology and social psychological inquiry.