Jean TweedyFollow

Date

11-2015

Department

School of Education

Degree

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Chair

Janet M. Brown

Keywords

axial coding, classroom teaching, freshman composition, grounded theory, open coding, Teacher/student relationship

Disciplines

Curriculum and Instruction | Curriculum and Social Inquiry | Education | Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research | Educational Methods | Educational Psychology

Abstract

This qualitative grounded theory study is focused on the teacher/student relationship that develops in a freshman composition class when writing is being taught and how that relationship exists during the writing process. Notes were generated through field observation of three freshman English 101 classes, personal interviews with 12 students who were members of the three freshman English 101 classes observed by me, and final grade records for each student in each class obtained from the registrar’s office. The ability and perceived willingness of the English teacher to communicate with students is the prime motivating factor for confidence within the students to begin, proceed, and complete a writing assignment at the student’s highest level of performance. The students involved in this study related that the student perceived self-confidence is directly related to the amount and level of communication to be had with the teacher. If a student, for any reason, feels that he/she is unable to communicate openly with the teacher at will about the paper being produced for that class, the student feels not only a lack of motivation to do the best work possible but has a conception within his/her mind that the final written product will be unsatisfactory. The above statements rest on the foundational concept, as articulated by the students during the course of this research project, that student self-confidence during the production of a paper is the key factor for composing the best written work that a student can yield. Key words: grounded theory, substantive theory, social theory, generalizability, constant comparative analysis, coding, coding categories, triangulation of data, random sampling, field note saturation and memo saturation

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