Socio practice question

evaluate the strengths and limitations of using secondary data to investigate the academic progress of pupils in schools.

any help would be appreciated

Reply 1

KA139

Original post by hollyrob123

evaluate the strengths and limitations of using secondary data to investigate the academic progress of pupils in schools.

any help would be appreciated

heyy
Im not sure if this is correct in this context as it depends what sort of points the item talked about
Strengths:
its time efficient - can just look at teacher gradebooks for a particular subject class for example, and can see how the student has made progress over a set amount of time. As the data is already collected, it means that the researcher will already have access to the data and wont have to collect it, so more time effective - the researcher can spend more time looking at more data and finding more trends making study more generalisable/representative and valid by having a bigger sample

Limitations:
Access - because it is in a school setting, the researcher will first need access to the gatekeeper of the school - a problem here would be that the researcher will obviously need to debrief the school on what he/she is intending on doing and what the data will be used for
studying academic progress of pupils could be a topic that school might not be keen on sharing - if school is underperforming, they wouldn't want researcher to 'expose' that as it would portray the school in a negative light.
Also, if the researcher does make it pass the gatekeeper or even not, teachers might refuse to show the researcher the progress the students are making - they might feel like they are being judged especially is the class is not doing so good.
if can't get access, small sample size - not very representative/valid

you could go down this route
strengths:
access: easy access to data online. have tables online of exam results. have access to a large amount of data.
researcher can compare to see how pupil progress has increased over the tears by comparing exam results.

Limitations
how official stats are collected might have changed over time - so if the researcher wanted to make any comparisons then it could be hard to find any common trends and patterns

hope that helped in any way