Hard versus soft data?

Eighteen months ago, I was really lucky: I received a grant from the SMARTer Kids Foundation. In my technology-deprived high school, SMART Interactive Whiteboards are more myth than mainstream. Yet I was going to receive one due to a research project I had proposed! It was titled, “Look! Johnny and Janey Can Read: Enhancing the Literate Lives of Teens through SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard Technology.” I wanted to study whether students’ overall literacy levels could improve by utilizing both print and visual texts, with the SMART Interactive Whiteboard as delivery vehicle within the traditional public school classroom.

Since the Call for Proposals included the criterion “should have a sound, rigorous research methodology,” I designed a mixed method research design.

Now let it be said: as a qualitative researcher, I was most interested in analyzing data on students’ learning processes. I like to observe then tell the stories of students’ lives as learners. This project would take most of an entire school year, and I was keenly interested to compose four narratives about students who fit the description of “the children we worry about the most” (Hankins, 2003).

However, I was conscious that quantitative research is still more highly prized. Thus, I offered to code and analyze via SPSS to describe frequencies of identified variables; one sample T-test with test variable “curriculum track in English class;” paired sample T-test, with variables “score on previous standardized test” and “think of self as literate;” and, comparisons of pre- and post-test assessment indicators. Ultimately, I wondered, “Would incorporating SMART Interactive Whiteboard Technology enhance student performance on mandated statewide testing?”

Fast forward to 2008. I’ve completed the qualitative aspects of the report and am now beginning collaboration with a colleague who will check (and probably heavily edit) my quantitative data. You can view the qualitative component of my report at http://smarterkids.org/research/library_subject.asp.

This week, I received my first response to the article I wrote. The response was, honestly, a backdoor compliment at best. Yes, the person who found me through the internet was delighted that my students had received and learned through the SMART Board so positively. She knew of many qualitative and anecdotal reports with similar findings. Yet, she required “hard data” to sell her own district on the merits of capital investing toward SMART Boards in their district classrooms.

Hard versus soft data, hhhmmm? There's that issue of researcher bias emerging again. And the targets seem to be almost exclusively qualitative researchers.

Regardless of socio-economic class, race, or gender, all students have tremendous abilities to be critical readers of their worlds when offered the tools for success. Drawing from a Freirian (1992) perspective, I help learners to struggle for academic success “not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (p. 34). This social justice orientation raises complicated issues about power and knowledge and does contain bias. As a teacher-researcher, I must constantly identify ethical dilemmas. Our lives as practitioners and our lives as partners, members of cultural communities, and political citizens are intertwined richly. As Haraway (1988) argues,

“…only partial perspective promises objective vision. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see” (p.583).

I believe a false dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity, between the personal and professional, pervades educational thinking. Actions in many domains of all teachers’ lives contribute to praxis. While I argue that a teacher cannot leave one identity at the public classroom door and assume another elsewhere, I also recognize that teachers, students, and their families do not always share the same values. We live in a pluralistic society. Values are a community standard. I constantly debate issues of justice versus caring (Noddings, 1984), and I reconcile the two by creating a classroom climate that is safe, meaningful, and consistent with community contexts.

I will leave you with questions to ponder. How many quantitative researchers offer climates where all students have chances to be successful? In what ways do quantitative researchers really know the humans they are studying and, so, live in conscious states between personal and professional --- never really leaving one to become solely the other? To what extent do quantitative researchers accept and identify their own areas of biases?

Hard data versus soft data are jargon, and distinctions between the two rise from an accepted American binary cultural system. Do quantitative researchers seek to escape binary thought and attempt to navigate the multiplicity of learning possibilities in our postmodern world? Let's just say it: all researchers have bias. As teacher-researchers, our focus must become how to reconcile that bias with the humans we observe in the constant goal to foster educational reform.


Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Hankins, K. H. (2003). Teaching through the storm: A journal of hope. New York: Teachers College Press.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.