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The Need for Mixed Methods in the Study of Youth Pathways: The Case of the Longitudinal Study of Connected Learning

Sat, April 29, 10:35am to 12:05pm, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 221 C

Abstract

Studying youth pathways through interest-related pursuits demands a longitudinal, cross-setting approach (Barron, 2010; Crowley, Barron, Knutson, & Martin, 2015). Although many studies exist that examine youth’s pursuits related to a specific content area (e.g., Sha, Schunn, & Bathgate, 2015), and others focus on documenting youth’s learning ecologies (Barron, 2006), there has been more limited effort to trace youth’s pursuits as they transform over time and across setting. An exception is Azevedo’s (Azevedo, 2011, 2013) “lines of practice” research, which takes a qualitative approach to the study of specific pursuits.

Our research takes a mixed-methods approach to the study of youth’s interest-related pursuits, using quantitative survey methods to examine patterns of experience across large numbers of youth, interviews to study youth’s identities and imagined futures, and youth-led research (with GIS and mapping) to explore how youth see connections across the different settings of their lives. We argue that these methods offer complementary perspectives on youths’ interest-related pursuits, which are necessary when one shifts to a focus on “pursuit” rather than on interest in a particular topic.

This study draws upon surveys with 266 youth we followed over three years. Fifty-four youth participated in interviews after two waves of surveys, and a subset of youth engaged in participatory research related to youth’s perceptions of how they were recognized across different settings. Our focal pursuit was something that youth told us they enjoyed doing, believed they were getting better at or learning from over time, and sought out whenever they had the opportunity.

The methods yielded complementary data on pursuits. Our survey studies helped us see continuities and discontinuities in youths’ pursuits over time and to characterize commonalities and differences in their experiences of pursuits according to the Connected Learning framework (Ito et al., 2013), a synthetic model for characterizing ecological supports for interest-related pursuits. At the same time, they offered us little window into youths’ participation in everyday practices. Informed by social practice theory (Dreier, 2008, 2009), we decided to conduct interviews for a third wave with youth, which helped us to learn more about their pursuits, purposes for participation, their current involvement in their activity, the networks (e.g. linkages and supports) they drew upon when participating in their activity, obstacles they experienced, and how they perceived the future as related to their participation. The interviews also garnered youths’ perspectives on how their participation changed over time. We also carried out two cycles of youth-led research into youth’s pursuits, organizing a network of distributed sites virtually to investigate their own pursuits locally in interviews and mapping. These activities allowed us to see how youth might reimagine their schools and communities as places where they could deepen their exploration of pursuits.

Our studies have focused on how museum program design supports youth’s science-linked identities, and they have included an examination of youths’ suspension and redistribution of interest-related activities, how youth are brokered into programs that support their interests, and an analysis of how the video game Starcraft influenced three players’ identity development.

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