Grounded Theory as an approach to studying students’ uses of learning management systems

Abstract

This paper presents the first phase of a qualitative study of students' use of a Learning Management System (LMS). A group of students at Kingston University with experience of two different systems were afforded the opportunity to study the relationship between the interface to an LMS and the usability of the system.A 'Grounded Theory' methodology (Glaser and Strauss, 1967)

Studying the learning of programming using grounded theory to support activity theory

“…As Alsop and Tompsett (2002) suggest, the methods that researchers use to collect data seem unimportant to students and to stakeholders such as lecturers. However, to achieve accurate and reliable data, the choice of methodology is critical.…”

“…The nature of the subject being examined (learning Programming); . The number of students involved [in our case the numbers being relatively small and so qualitative research methods were chosen to 'provide a rich description of the students' behaviours' (Alsop and Tompsett 2002) during the research]; . The changes in sample during the research life-cycle; and .…”

“…Data collection Two open-ended questions (adapted from Alsop and Tompsett 2002) were used in this research. Students were asked to write about their best and worst educational experiences of learning programming and to specify the tools they used.…”

Combining Activity Theory and Grounded Theory for the Design of Collaborative Interfaces

“…Variables, as known from quantitative studies are labeled as codes, categories and concepts. Exploring and understanding the interrelationship between categories and concepts (theoretical sensitivity) is one of the main analytical processes of this approach [8,10,22].…”

“…Mixing methods might be a viable solution to overcome these problems of complexity and can be beneficial rather than contradictory [4]. We believe that the combination of two qualitative approaches, activity theory [5,6,7] and grounded theory [8,9,10,11,12] is suitable to address these issues. An earlier study, conducted in 2007 [13] already took this issue into account and the combination of qualitative content analysis and grounded theory has been tested.…”