Table of Contents
Introduction
Educational efforts to enhance students’ performance are always underway, and in the recent past, adequate attention has been accorded to active teaching/learning strategies (National Association for Sport and PE (NASPE), 2011). Active learning strategies are usually used to enhance teaching through active learning participation. In an effort to enhance teaching, there is need to combine the various instructional strategies to capture the various learning needs of the students. Active learning is just one aspect of teaching, but in order to facilitate effective teaching, there is need to consider the kind of instructional strategy (ies) to be used because various factors are considered to ensure effective learning. These factors include: “time allocated to a lesson, physical environment, content to be taught, students’ learning needs as mentioned earlier, and teacher’s personal style” (NASPE, 2011, par. 3). The use of combined instructional strategies is meant to help students develop self-regulation, that is, a “sense of conscious control over their cognitive processes” (Alfassi, 2004, p. 171).
Problem Statement
When preparing a lesson plan, teachers are often using various instructional strategies to execute their teaching objectives with the assumption that this will have an effect on the students’ learning needs. However, there are few studies that have tried to investigate the kind of combined instructional strategies that have effect on high school students’ needs by understanding the student’s view about them. Literature has always considered active learning to have a positive effect on the students’ academic performance. In the same way, involving students in selection of effective learning strategies can be thought to enhance learning even further.
Research Objectives
- To determine the learning needs of high school students
- To develop various combination teaching strategies
- To understand the students’ perceptions towards the efficacy of various combined teaching strategies
- To investigate students’ perceptions towards the use of the various teaching instructional strategies in reference to the content being taught
- To devise the kind of instructional strategies that are able to meet the students’ learning needs
Literature Review
Often, studies on instructional strategies focus on the efficacy of a particular learning strategy, for example, deep learning as indicated by Cheung (2015). The approach by Cheung is meant to aid in the attainment of students’ self-efficacy during learning, and as Alfasssi (2004), indicates below, the same can be derived from combined instructional strategies. Usually, studies striving to examine the efficacy of learning teaching strategies tend to utilize various teaching techniques, but they fail to evaluate the confounding effect of this combination on learning and students’ academic performance.
In another study by Alfassi (2004), combined instructional strategies were shown to be beneficial on reading skills. This study is quite old and merely focused on reading strategies; yet, this current study will focus on the general classroom set-up. Alfassi (2004) lays a basis for the essence of combined instructional strategies but the current study goes beyond reading to include various subjects and classroom activities. For example, while during the same reading exercise, there could be a combination of various teaching approaches that are teacher-centered, but with an additional style like the inclusion of a radio lesson to enhance description of the instructions.
Research Design
A qualitative research approach will be used to understand the perceptions of high school students based on their experiences on the use of combined instructional strategies. This research approach utilizes open-ended questions to enable the participants to talk about their perceptions at length because there is no predetermined restrictions (University of Southern California, 2017). The researcher, thereby, will engage the participants in interviews that will be audio recorded and used during data analysis as indicated below. Selection of participants in qualitative studies is purposive; hence, in reference to the guiding research objectives, this study will focus on high school students of either gender because there is no predetermined restriction on the basis of gender. Also, the sample size will not be predetermined because the number of participants will be guided by the extent of the information obtained, which must be guided by the elements under study.
Data Analysis
Information will be transcribed from the video recorder and coded to enhance referencing. Information will be then be arranged into themes and sub-themes and used in interpretive analysis. This method of analysis involves three stages: deconstruction, interpretation, and reconstruction. The deconstruction phase involves the segregation of data by using codes or arraigning them into categories based on similarities. Interpretation entails deriving relationships and differences among the data and looking for theories that might help to explain the derived relationships. Lastly, reconstruction includes the systematic arrangement of the themes and subthemes derived at the interpretation stage in a more meaningful way (Sargeant, 2012).
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Summary
Combined teaching strategies are usually used to enhance learning on various occasions, but there is limited research on how students feel about these strategies, and whether they consider them to be beneficial or not. Therefore, to understand these perceptions, a qualitative study will be used where a questionnaire with open-ended questions will be administered by the researcher.
- Alfassi, M. (2004). Reading to learn: Effects of combined strategy instruction on high school students. The Journal of Educational Research, 97(4), 171-184.
- Cheung, D. (2015). The combined effects of classroom teaching and learning strategy use on students’ chemistry self-efficacy. Research in Science Education, 45(1), 101-116.
- National Association for Sport and PE (NASPE). (2011). Combine teaching styles and strategies for effective instruction.
- Sargeant, J. (2012). Qualitative Research Part II: Participants, Analysis, and Quality Assurance. Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 4(1), 1–3.
- University of Southern California. (2017). Organizing your social sciences research paper: Qualitative methods.