Results From a Study Conducted With High School Students, Teachers and Pre-Service Teachers, Article Critique Example

Purpose

The article’s purpose is to report results from a study conducted with high school students, teachers and pre-service teachers. The results were analyzed after a year of the subjects’ participation in the study.

Why Was It Written

The article was written to show that findings suggested that an article-within-an-article format can be used for further development and also for strengthening arguments in research claims. The article uses socio-transformative constructivism in its theoretical framework and presents some point of views looking into issues of difficulties which teachers from an Anglo-European background can encounter when it comes to understanding Latino/a students from a socio-economically impoverished area.

Argument Support

The article suggests that there is a need in preparing teachers more for social change in their environment. And, there is a high need for providing more effective means for students teachers to take on challenges in their work where they see it is needed, depending on their environment. The research was designed around a semi-structured concept map which provided students with unit topics that can be connected in terms of theme by their lines. They found that there was statistical improvement with their results; however the students still scored low. These results were interpreted as the students’ lack of experience with concept maps.

The article suggests also that there should be more effort from the school in regards to shifting their expectations of students, and presenting more challenging tasks.

Advantages / Disadvantages

Advantages

• It was easy to read
• Presented in a straight-forward way
• Data and statistics were clear and organized

Disadvantages

• The duration of the study could have been longer
• There were multiple conclusions