The ‘Disengaged’ and ‘Underachieving’ Boy?: Boys Early Educational Experiences of Pedagogical Practices.
If professionals working with young children do not provide appropriate pedagogical experiences during children’s early education, then the achievement gap may continue and disengagement in boys may be apparent from the outset, and impact on the rest of their school life. This research aims to address the gap in knowledge and develop current research of ‘The ‘Disengaged’ and ‘Underachieving’ Boy? Boys Early Educational Experiences of Pedagogical Practices’. This presentation will analyse and evaluate of the pilot study conducted to test out the methods of data collection to be undertaken with boys aged between 3 and 5 years old.
This paper begins with an argument that most measure development in the social sciences, with its reliance on correlational techniques as a tool, falls short of the requirements for constructing meaningful, unidimensional measures of human attributes. By demonstrating how rating scales are ordinal-level data, we argue the necessity of converting these to equal-interval units to develop a measure that is both qualitatively and quantitatively defensible. This requires that the empirical results and theoretical explanation are questioned and adjusted at each step of the process. In our response to the reviewers, we describe how this approach was used to develop the Game Engagement Questionnaire (GEQ), including its emphasis on examining a continuum of involvement in violent video games. The GEQ is an empirically sound measure focused on one player characteristic that may be important in determining game influence.