Educational Enquiry Education Article Analysis - Essay Example

? I chose the first pair of articles, “Children’s patterns of composition and their reflections on the composing process” by Myhill and “Connecting drama and writing: seizing the moment to write” by Cremin et. al., because they were on topics that interested me and because they provided two very different examples of how to construct an abstract. The Cremin et. al. article is relatively clear with its research questions, stating them explicitly in its abstract. The article seeks “to understand the nature of the support that drama offers to children as writers, and to identify features of writing which regularly surfaced in drama-related writing (Cremin 2006). In other words, they wanted to see how drama can aid children in the writing process, and see what trends emerged when drama was used as a supportive tool for children writers. The article by Myhill is somewhat more vague in its statement of purpose in the abstract. It essentially states that the purpose of this article was to understand “secondary-aged writer’s compositional processes, both as observed in a naturalistic classroom settings and through […] interviews” (Myhill 2010). From the reports of the findings, however, it is clear that the researcher was interested in forming particular profiles for particular types of writers, seeing what kinds of writers fit in to them, and understand better how self-aware students were about their writing process. The Cremin et. al. abstract did not specify any particular scope or scale in terms of age, beyond indicating that all students in the study were primary students, nor on the size of the study, and its applicability to other fields. It was, however, fairly specific in indicating it was only interested in drama writing as a support for developing writing skills. The Myhill article is very specific on the scale of the research, indicating that it was carried out on only “38 children” from “Year 9 and Year 11” (Myhill 2010). It also recognizes the preliminary nature of this research, indicating that the “implications of [the article’s] findings” need “further confirmatory research (Myhill 2010). With how vague the scope and scale of the research is in the Cremin et. al. article, it is very difficult to say whether it was appropriate to answer the research questions presented in the abstracts. The fact that the article gives an overview of two pilot study and a larger main study suggests that it is probably appropriate for the research question, given the narrow focus on drama. The scope and scale of the Myhill article, especially noting its relatively small sample size, are insufficient to actually form strong evidence for the research question. This is acceptable, however, given that the author explicitly states the purpose of this article was to reach preliminary answers and encourage further research. The Cremin et. al. abstract clearly had accessibility as a primary concern: it uses relatively simple language and no academic jargon, though it did have complex sentence structures. The Myhill article was significantly more complex, using terms like “post hoc” (after the fact) and seemed intended for a more professional audience (Myhill 2010). Neither of these articles had attached keywords. Some appropriate key words for both articles would be: writing, writing theory, educational theory, education and pedagogy, because all of these issues are central to both articles. The Cremin article should have individual keywords including drama and primary education, while the Myhill article should include words including secondary education, writing composition and qualitative study to give a good indication as to its subject matter, focus and sample demographics. Upon searching for some of these key words, it was interesting to see that some were much more specific and helpful than others. The keyword “pedagogy” for instance, returned tens of thousands of results on a truly gigantic range of education related topics, as one would perhaps imagine given the relationship between educational research and pedagogy. Educational theory performed similarly robustly, returning tens of thousands of results on a truly gigantic array of topics, though the time span represented by this search term seemed to be relatively smaller than the returns for pedagogy, focused more in the past thirty to forty years as opposed to a much broader time span for pedagogy, perhaps indicating an increased interest in the theory behind education, or perhaps simply a vocabulary shift. The truly powerful results came when using some of the broader words (such as educational theory) with a more specific search term such as drama or secondary-education – this seemed to return a much tighter group of articles on subjects more closely related to the subject presented in the two papers. It was also interesting to note that search terms that one might expect to be opposed with each other (such as secondary education and primary education) could be searched for together and would render results of studies and articles which had a broad enough range to encompass both groups. It was also interesting to note that “writing theory” tended to return much more recently published articles than simply “educational theory” showing that there has probably been greater specialization in the past few decades than there was previously, and that more general texts might well be older whilst newer texts could have a much tighter focus. One of the problems, however, is that I chose the key words to use for this article, so my search results may simply be an artifact of my ability to choose keywords for educational articles, a skill that I have not honed very well as of yet. The Cremin et. al. abstract was generally well composed, and would give the reader a good idea of whether they should continue to the main article or simply move on. It struggled with having to compact relatively complex ideas into a small framework, and was not very specific of its findings, but these are all acceptable faults. The Myhill abstract was also strong, but in very different ways. It had a relatively wide scope with a relatively narrow group of people being studied, and gave the reader more information about the subjects of the study but less about the findings than could perhaps be desired. Works Cited Cremin, T., Goouch, K., Blakemore, L., Goff, E. and Macdonald, R. (2006) ‘Connecting drama and writing: seizing the moment to write’, Research in Drama Education, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 273–91. Mayhill, D. (2010). ‘Children’s patterns of composition and their reflections on their composing processes,’ British Educational Research Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 47-64. Read More