Scholarly DNP Project I

Theoretical Framework Video Transcript

Dr. Amanda Rockinson Szapkiw: Welcome to the Research Planning Process series. This is Dr. Amanda Rockinson Szapkiw. In this session, we're going to focus on the theoretical framework. We have two goals in this session, first, we're going to define the theoretical framework, and second, we're going to understand the role that the theoretical plays in the research process.

Theoretical framework is really a collection of interrelated concepts or a theory in which you ground your research. A theoretical framework guides your research, determining what you'll measure, the relationships that you're looking for, it even determines what units of interest you're in, your constructs, your variables, how you understand the relationship between those variables and also the boundaries of interaction that creates boundaries for your research.

Maxwell in 2005 said that a theoretical framework really serves two purposes, and I have them listed on this slide. He first says that it's to show how your research fits into what is already known. Again, like I said, the relationship to the existing theory or research. It's also to show how your research makes a contribution to the topic in the field.

Let's think about it in terms of human beings of theoretical framework. Think for a moment, what is your belief about the nature of human beings? Do you believe that they're mainly good? Do you believe that they're lazy? Do you believe that they're basically untrustworthy? Everyone has a belief about the basic nature of human beings and that belief really guides how you interact with other people, it guides how you think about other people. The same thing about a theoretical framework, a theoretical framework really guides your study, it helps you organize all of your ideas.

A theoretical study really guides your literature review, it guides your research, it informs your questions as well as your methodology. A theory in a qualitative study is used conductively, in a quantitative study, it's used deductively. In a quantitative study as a researcher, the theory really should ground your plan for your research. The objective is for you to test or verify your theory. You thus usually began the study with advancing the theory, that's what you have in mind, you want to advance the theoretical framework, you want to advance the theory, you collect data to test it and then you reflect on the results that you have and decide, do your results confirm or do they disconfirm the theory? The theory really becomes the framework. Like I said, it becomes the framework for the entire study. If you think about it as an organizing model for your research questions, for your hypotheses and really your entire data collection. Maxwell says that really a theoretical framework helps you answer two questions, what's the problem and why is your approach feasible?

Now, we've talked about a theoretical framework conceptually… Dr. Zeidler in her paper, What is a Theoretical Framework, a Practical Answer, provides a hypothetical situation in which really demonstrates how a theoretical framework guides research and the research question specifically, so let's take a look at that hypothetical situation she provides us with and gain some insight about a theoretical framework.

A student, let's say a doctoral student, becomes really intrigued by the importance of questioning in a secondary classroom, let's say she's a secondary teacher, and she's noticed that some her students really, really benefit from higher-level thinking questions whereas some of the others just don't, and she's wondering why that is. Well, since she's a doctoral student, she's thinking about using this for a dissertation, she needs to empirically ground the question, find out if her questions even empirically significant. Maybe she can go to the literature and actually find the answers. So she begins researching, questioning, questioning strategies, the effectiveness of questioning strategies, and what she finds out is that the results from the literature are really contradictory, there some studies that say that higher cognitive level questions lead to more achievement, but then there's probably about an equal number of studies that says that there is no difference in the type of question, whether it's low-level or high-level questioning, and there's also some that say higher-level questioning is worse.

At this point, what does she do? She begins reflecting on what she's found, speculating about some possible explanations for the contradictory literature, and she's doing this, she remembers Pitage. Pitage said that students are at different cognitive levels at different ages. Therefore, she starts thinking about questioning in terms of what Pitage says, that there are different cognitive levels at different ages. She then goes back to the literature and begins meticulously searching the literature on questioning in relationship to cognitive development and starts pulling some of the theory on cognitive development. In doing this, she comes up with a possible explanation, could it be that students at different cognitive levels, because that's what cognitive theory says, different cognitive levels actually process and are affected by questionings at different levels differently? Let me say that again, could it possibly be that students at different cognitive levels are affected differently by questions of different cognitive levels?

Her theory helps her understand why there could potentially be contradictory literature. No one to this point has actually looked at the match between the level of questioning and the cognitive level of the child, and maybe if some of the studies looked at lower-level students or students that were younger and used higher level questioning, it wasn't appropriate and therefore it wasn't effective. Whereas if the studies looked at children, let's say, 10 to 14 in middle school or high school and the students were highly cognitive functioning, then high-cognitive level questions positively affected them. So the theory helps her frame and understand the problem as well as what's occurring in the literature.

The theoretical framework informs her research questions, her methodology as well as her hypotheses. Here are the hypotheses she then comes up with. Both high and low cognitive level students will benefit from both high and low level questions as opposed to no questions at all, and then only students categorized as high-cognitive level will benefit more from the high cognitive level questions than from the low-level questions.

The hypothetical situation that we just looked at really helps us better understand the theoretical framework. As you can see, a theoretical framework is like a spotlight, it's useful in illuminating what we see, it really highlights the relationship between what's been identified and what hasn't, and we really saw how Pitage's theory illuminated what was going on in the literature in terms of questioning.

A theoretical framework, and we didn't discuss this is [inaudible 00:08:11], a theoretical framework is also like a coat closet, it's where you hang everything. This really becomes important when you explain your results and understand the results. For example, in our hypothetical situation, this doctoral student, when she receives the results, maybe she finds that if you match the question to the level of thinking that a student's at, the question is effective. That can be clearly explained by Pitage's work.

I really think that examples are helpful in understanding complex concepts such as theoretical framework, so let's take a look at one other study and further understand the theoretical framework and as well as understand the difference between what I call the big T and the little T. Big T is theory and little T is theoretical.

A few years ago, I wanted to study the effectiveness of distance education for adults. Now, my first challenge was to define effectiveness, what we know about adult learners is that traditional behavioral methods of teaching do not necessarily work. Strategies grounded in social constructivism and on constructivism is really more effective. So I knew that my big T when I'm defining effective learning, my big T really needed to be something such as from Vygotsky, or Dewey, or Pitage, something grounded in social constructivism. That's my big T. However, those theories don't necessarily strictly apply to adult learners and distance education, so I started to search for a theoretical framework that was grounded in these bigger Ts.

What I came across was and what I came across in the literature is that there were really two things that are important for effective education, and that's community as well as critical thinking or higher-order learning. So through my literature review, what I found was a theoretical framework called the community of inquiry framework, and what that framework says is that there are three things that are necessary, three factors that are necessary for effective education to occur, and that's social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence. Those three elements must be present in a higher education online classroom in order for it to be effective. So that became the theoretical framework, my understanding for how I defined effectiveness in my study.

Now, here's something else, I said I wanted to understand the effectiveness of online learning and distance education, and so I used that theoretical framework to define that. However, what I was really interested in, and this was based on experience, was does the use of synchronous technologies in the classroom make online learning more effective? Let me take a moment and define synchronous and asynchronous, and specifically what I was thinking of using in my study.

When I say synchronous, what I mean is real-time interaction through a computer or some type of mobile device, such as videoconferencing. I specifically wanted to look at videoconferencing in which people got online and videoed themselves and interacted in real time. I wanted to compare that type of interaction and communication in the classroom with asynchronous communication, and that's when people interact at delayed times or not in real time. For example, discussion forums, someone posts a question or a comment, and somebody comes by two or three hours later, reads it, reflects on it and posts a comment or a question back, and I wanted to know what would be more effective for communicating among learners.

Now, why would I even study that? I had to consider why was that even important to study, do I have any theoretical justification for studying? Now, in education, there really wasn't any theory that would justify it, however, if I moved to communication theory, I found that there were several theories and theoretical frameworks that have been developed that said that the more natural communication on the computer is, the more face-to-face like it is, the more effective the communication is. So the more real life like we get with communication over the internet, the better two people interacting understand each other, the better they're able to understand complex concepts.

So I those theories and said, "Okay, let's test them and do they now apply to education?" Taking that media naturalness theory, if I test it in the education realm, what I would hope to see if it holds true is that synchronous communication, because it's more lifelike, actually increases the effectiveness of learning or the effectiveness of the distance education classroom. So my question then became, is there a difference in student social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence based on the type of technology that's used in the classroom for communication? Now, again, the effectiveness, the community of inquiry framework helps me define what effectiveness was in my study. It was the lenses that I looked through to understand effectiveness, and what I was really doing in my study was testing the media naturalness theory and to see if it held true in education.

As you can see again, the theoretical framework really helped me or helps anyone understand the variables and constructs that are being studied, the relationship between them as well as the… It provides a boundary for exactly what is being studied and really guides the research question.

Let's talk about your work and your research. You've come up with an idea, now you need to work on how you understand that phenomenon, that idea that you're going to study and you need to come up with a theoretical justification for it.

The theoretical justification may be a big T or it may be a little T. When you actually go to discuss it in your manuscript, you need to talk about your primary theory or theoretical framework. If your primary theoretical framework is a little T, you need to talk about the big T in which it's grounded in. You then need… I talk about theoretical justification, so you talk about your theory, you then talk about how your theory helps inform your research, you discuss how you hope to advance that theory. In the example that I gave of media naturalness theory, what I'd seen in literature was that the media naturalness theory, which is actually based in media richness, that theory held true in the communication field, and I was testing to see if it held true in the education field. So, you discuss your theory, you give a general description of it, you discuss if it's been refined over time and if it's gone from a big T to a little T, you discuss how the theory advanced or informed the literature on your topic, you talk about how it informs your research and then finally you're going to conclude by articulating how your focus relates to or potentially advances the identified theories. So just describing and explaining how the theory informs your research and then how you hope to advance the research.

This concludes our session on theoretical framework. I hope you have a better understanding of the theoretical framework as well as are now able to define—