4. METHODOLOGY
4.1 Q UESTIONNAIRE DATA
4.1.6 Numerical data from other sources
The HDI index was developed in 1990 by a team of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) researchers led by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, and has been used and refined since 1993 by the UNDP in its annual report. The HDI is a composite of three basic components of human development: health, education and standard of living. Health is measured by life expectancy. Education is measured by a combination of adult literacy (two thirds weight) and mean years of schooling (one third weight). Standard of living is measured by purchasing power, based on real GDP per capita adjusted for the local cost of living (purchasing power parity). Table 1 shows the components of the Human Development Index as well as the index itself. I will not describe each variable in detail but for those interested a detailed description of the methods used in creating the HDI is available in the annual HDI report (UNDP, 2004).
Methodology
Table 1 The Human Development Index of in 2003 of 29 countries participating in ROSE (UNDP, 2006).
15 United Kingdom7 0.939 78.4 .. 123 27,147
21 Spain 0.928 79.5 97.7 94 22,391
23 Israel 0.915 79.7 96.9 91 20,033
24 Greece 0.912 78.3 91.0 92 19,954
27 Portugal 0.904 77.2 92.5 94 18,126
36 Poland 0.858 74.3 99.7 90 11,379
Medium human development
61 Malaysia 0.796 73.2 88.7 71 9,512
62
Russian Federation
0.795 65.3 99.4 90 9,230
84 Philippines 0.758 70.4 92.6 82 4,321
94 Turkey 0.750 68.7 88.3 68 6,772
127 India 0.602 63.3 61.0 60 2,892
131 Botswana 0.565 36.3 78.9 70 8,714
138 Ghana 0.520 56.8 54.1 46 2,238
139 Bangladesh 0.520 62.8 41.1 53 1,770
144 Uganda 0.508 47.3 68.9 74 1,457
145 Zimbabwe 0.505 36.9 90.0 55 2,443
Low human development
147 Swaziland 0.498 32.5 79.2 60 4,726
149 Lesotho 0.497 36.3 81.4 66 2,561
7 England and Northern Ireland have the same HDI value.
In this research I assume that these three variables help to indicate an important and, most importantly, readily available indicator of the social environment in the
participating countries. The HDI value of the 29 countries used for this comparison can be seen in Table 1. The HDI value is presented in descending order. The table also includes the rank number of each country. In all about 200 countries are evaluated. By definition the countries in the table are divided into three categories.
Countries with HDI value higher than 0.8 are referred to as countries with high human development. Countries with HDI value higher than 0.5 and less than 0.8 are referred to as countries with medium human development. Countries with HDI value less than 0.5 are referred to as countries with low human development (UNDP, 2006).
Electronic questionnaire
An electronic questionnaire was made to collect what I considered to be sensitive personal background information. This was information I wanted to receive directly from each learner that participated in the interviews and therefore the learners were asked not to discuss the questions while answering them. Some of this information is not numerical by nature and the sample used to answer the questionnaire was not statistically representative for the population of 15 year old learners in Iceland. I programmed the data collection interface in a web-design software called FrontPage8 and the data was submitted by the learner from the interface to a web based database management system called Access9.
The interface consisted of four screens. The first screen appeared when the learners were asked to type http://natturufraedi.khi.is/vidhorf/ in the URL line of their internet browser. This screen contained one screen fill of text explaining the purpose of the data collection and informing the learner how the data was going to be used regarding the personal nature of the data being gathered.
8 Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 see http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage
Methodology
Figure 5 The first screen of the data collection interface. The webpage is viewed in Internet Explorer10 6.0.
To get to screen number two the learners had to click the word questionnaire which was blue and underlined as standard hyperlinks usually are. Screen number two contained two blank spaces for the learner to fill in a username and password. At this point I gave the learners their username and password. After clicking the submit button on the screen they continued to screen number three.
Screen number three was the main screen that contained the questions to be answered.
The questions were divided in five parts which could by found by scrolling down the webpage. At the bottom of the webpage there was a submit button for submitting the data to the database.
The first part of the question list was called ‘help at home’ and contained two open item questions. The first one was: ‘How much help do you get from your parents when studying science?’ and the second one was: ‘Why do you get
much/little/average help from your parents?’
The second part was called ‘friends’ and consisted of three open ended items. The first one was: ‘Are your friends interested in science related issues?’ The second one was: ‘What science related issues are they interested in?’ and the third one was: ‘Why or why not are they interested in these issues?’
The third part was called ‘self-evaluation’ and consisted of two open-ended items and two self-efficacy constructs represented with seven, five point scale items and three,
10 Microsoft Internet Explorer see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie
five point scale items. The first open-ended item was: ‘How are you doing in school science?’ The second open ended item was: ‘Why do you think so?’ The first seven scale items (see Figure 6) were to measure so called subject specific self-efficacy (see discussion about self-efficacy in Chapter 3.4).
How confident are you that you can…
not confident very confident
pass science at the end of this term?
pass science at the end of this term with a grade better
than a 5?
pass science at the end of this term with a grade better
than a 6?
pass science at the end of this term with a grade better
than a 7?
pass science at the end of this term with a grade better
than an 8?
pass science at the end of this term with a grade better
than a 9?
get 10 in science at the end of this term with a grade
better than a?
Figure 6 Items used to measure subject specific self-efficacy. Adapted from Bong and Skaalvik (2003).
The last three scale items were used to measure so called task-specific self-efficacy (see Figure 7). As my research developed I decided to sharpen the focus on the learner perceptions of science related issues (described in Chapter 5.2). Therefore I did not find it useful to raise the discussion about expectation of success to a higher level by introducing more than one measurement of self-efficacy. Due to this reason the results of the task specific measurement of self-efficacy are not presented or discussed in this thesis although they are available in the dataset. Further information about the
measurement of self-efficacy can be found in Bong and Skaalvik (2003).
How confident are you that you can…
not confident very confident
use the concepts work, energy and power and describe
the relations between them?
work with concepts like power, pressure, buoyancy and mass and relate the knowledge to examples from daily
life?
work with simple calculations related to Newton’s
second law?
Figure 7 Items used to measure task specific self-efficacy adapted from Bong and Skaalvik
Methodology
The fourth part of the question list was called ‘Books at home’. The purpose of that part was to gather information that could shed light on the social standard of the learners’ families. This was a copy of item J in the ROSE questionnaire (see appendix). Due to the focus on learner perceptions and the amount of data already obtained this data was not studied further in this research.
The last part of the question list was called ‘Information about me’ and contained items that were used to obtain information about name, school, age, telephone of parent or guardian, e-mail address and MSN-address11. This part also included the yes/no item ‘It is ok to contact me by e-mail or on MSN if any questions arise during the interview analysis.’. The opportunity of contacting the learners via chat or e-mail was not used in the analysis of this research but remains an opportunity for possible follow-up research.
After pressing the submit button the fourth, and last, screen of the data collection interface appeared. This screen contained two sentences expressing the researchers’
gratitude towards the learners for their participation.
All in all the use of the electronic questionnaire was successful. The learners showed immediate interest and answered it without much help in less then ten minutes. All the learners were positive about being contacted at later stages and all the seventeen learners had an MSN address and an e-mail address they used regularly.