Making sense of the collected data

Triangulation image taken from http://www.watershedplanning.illinois.edu/profile_steps/step3.cfm

Having collected and categorized the data, the next step was to analyze the pieces of information gathered and connect them with these research questions.

• What is the effect of using Internet resources as a support on the development of a blended English course designed for deaf university students?

• What does the use Internet resources in a blended English course tell us about the language learning process of deaf university students?

• What insights about collaborative learning can be identified in an English course for deaf students?

The triangulation process.

Sagor (1993) defines the term triangulation as “the use of multiple independent data sources to corroborate findings”. For me, triangulation is a strategy to analyze the data gathered by the instruments since different perspectives in order to get different arguments that support the initial answers given to the research questions.

The different instruments enabled me to answer the following questions.

1. What did I see? direct observation, video recorded class.

2.. What did the deaf students tell me? surveys and the final interview

3. What did students " demonstate" ? students' artifacts, my logs and video recorded classes.

Trying to “manage” all the information gathered from the different instruments can be difficult for novice researchers like me. For example, I made a mistake because in the data analysis report, I described the data gathered by each instrument separately; in other words, without connecting them with the other instruments. After receiving the tutors’ feedback, I understood that it was necessary to “knit” all the ideas in a coherent and fluent way.

Although comparing and contrasting results was a long and hard process, it enabled me to identify useful data gathered from similar patterns from different sources which supported the work and increased my confidence towards the research study. It also helped to identify different patterns immersed in the project’s development. For instance, After watching the recorded interview several times to analyze the pieces of data and identify which ones could support the preliminary results given by the surveys and the students’ artifacts, I found “new” information that seemed “tacit” in the students’ discourse and it is quite useful to my research purposes, particularly, for the second cycle of this research study.

Thus, triangulation increases the validity and reliability of the collected data, improves the confidence of the researcher and provides a real” panorama” of the studied problem. In addition, it reveals other findings which are useful for a further study.

Reference Sagor R. ( 1999) How to conduct collaboative action research.Alexandria. VA, U.S.A.