WHAT. More?

In a recent post I outlined the WHAT technique, a “strong, yet simple, way to analyse and evaluate any research study” by encouraging students to break any study down into 4 key areas:

What were the aims of the study?

How was the study carried-out?

Answers: what were the key findings of the research?

Takeaways: what were the main conclusions to draw from the study and its findings?

The basic idea behind the technique is to help students identify the key information about a study they can easily reproduce in an essay or exam – something you’ll already know because you’ve already read said blog post.

Anyway, I thought it might be useful to help teachers introduce the technique through a simple PowerPoint Presentation that both outlined the technique and provided a breakdown of a real study by way of demonstrating to students how it worked in practice. I also thought that since students have to study Education with Methods in Context an example drawn from educational research would be a good one to use. Not only do students get a quick ’n’ dirty overview of a classic study, they also get a bonus “methods” section to boot.

However, what seemed like a quick win-win scenario for all involved – you got a manageable two or three slide Presentation as an aid to explanation, I didn’t spend way-too-much-time designing and creating it – rapidly spiralled out of control as I thought of more-and-more absolutely essential studies that should be added to the list. Currently, therefore, there are 24 studies on the list: from classic studies like Durkheim’s “Moral Education” (2003) that laid-out many of the ideas crucial to a Functionalist understanding of the world, the role of the education system and the individual’s relationship to both, to Bowles and Gintis’ “contemporary classic” “Schooling in Capitalist America” (1976) that laid the foundations for more-recent kinds of Neo-Marxist interpretations of the role of education in modern societies, to contemporary studies by writers like Francis and their critical analysis of one of education’s most persistent myths – “ability” groupings

1. Durkheim: Moral Education  (1903)

2. Douglas: The Home and the School (1964)

3. Rosenthal and Jacobson: Pygmalion in the Classroom (1968))

4. Rist: Student Social Class and Teacher Expectations (1970)

5. Hargreaves, Hester, and Mellor: Deviance in Classrooms (1975)

6. Bernstein: Class, Codes and Control (1975)

7. Willis: Learning to Labour (1975)

8. Bowles and Gintis: Schooling in Capitalist America (1976)

9. Sharpe: Just Like a Girl (1976, 1994)

10. Bourdieu: Cultural Capital (1977)

11. Ball: Beachside Comprehensive (1981)

12. Fuller: Black Girls in a London Comprehensive School (1984)

13. Chubb and Moe: Politics, Markets and America’s Schools (1990)

14. Mirza: Young, Female and Black (1992)

15. Mac an Ghaill: The Making of Men (1994)

16. Ball, Bowe and Gewirtz: Market Forces and Parental Choice (1994)

17. Sewell: Black Masculinities and Schooling (1997)

18. Gillborn and Youdell: Rationing Education (2000)

19. Ball: The Terrifying World of Performativity (2003)

20. Jackson:  Lads and Ladettes in Schools (2006)

21. Reay: The Zombie Stalking English Schools (2006)

22. Gillborn:  Racism and Education (2008)

23. Archer, Hollingworth and Mendick: Urban Youth and Schooling (2010)

24. Francis, Taylor and Tereshchenko: Reassessing ‘Ability’ Grouping (2019).

While this means you’re potentially faced with a very large Presentation that you have to search to find the one study you want to discuss with your students, I’ve added a menu system you can use from inside the Presentation to quickly find and select the Study you need.

Using the Presentation

This particular resource has been mainly designed for whole classroom use. It’s a reference-point a teacher can use when they introduce or refer to a particular study in, this instance, the Sociology of Education.

The content of each slide (the WHAT part) is designed to be a student-friendly digest of a specific study – a slide from which they can, if they want, take basic notes about a study that will give them sufficient information to reference the study in, say, an exam. The slide text has been kept deliberately brief for just this reason – but it should give you enough scope to expand on particular ideas if and when necessary. For example, if the text refers to the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy it neither defines it nor elaborates upon the possible consequences. In this respect the Presentation is about giving you opportunities, if and when required, to develop particular ideas noted in the text.

If you do, you will. And if you don’t, you won’t.

WHAT no evaluation?

You’ll also notice there’s no evaluation of each study, partly because I’ve adapted the WHAT technique slightly to do something it was never really designed to do (the technique’s main purpose is to structure how students respond to reading research studies) and partly because the Presentation itself is a starting-point for exploring a particular study. The idea here is that students are given sufficient information in the slides to understand the basics of a particular study and they can be encouraged to interpret and evaluate it in the context of their wider sociological knowledge (probably with a little judicious prompting from you…).

A Word (or Two) of Warning…

If you try to run the Presentation file through something like Microsoft Office Online (the default “open” when you download .pptx files in Microsoft Edge) and which has now been rebranded to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app (because AI is really expensive and Microsoft, having sunk a King’s Ransom into developing their version, are determined you will use it) the Presentation will not run properly. For reasons no-one really needs to understand, but probably has something to do with html5 not being able to display the kinds of jiggery-pokery shenanigans I’ve leveraged to make the Prentation presentable.

In short, if you want to use the Presentation in the way it was intended, download it to your computer and run it from the desktop.

Or use a browser like Google Chrome that does what you want it to do, not what it wants you to do…