Chapter Three - Detailed Description of Research Methodology and Implementation of Intervention

The intervention was a staged implementation design in such a way that Grade Nine students undertook a two-part pre-test, followed by the two field-based tasks of the intervention itself, and finally a post-test (which was identical in format to the pre-test).  The students were from four secondary schools.  Each school assigned one class (of about forty students in size) to the study – the classes were taken from the Secondary Three (Express) streams.  The students were therefore fourteen- to fifteen-years-old, and were of average academic ability.  Early drafts of the implementation design conceived of only one field-based task, possibly to be conducted in a more traditional control-experiment iteration.  Even before the pilot study, however, it was decided to split the single task into two simpler, complementary, ones in order to permit a more accurate interpretation of the data obtained.

Conceived of in this way, the intervention thus represented an attempt to investigate Vygotsky’s (1978: 35) twin contentions that “children are capable of reconstructing their perception and thus freeing themselves from the given structure of the field”, and that children’s behaviour is “not regulated solely by the salience of individual elements within their perceptual field; instead, children evaluate the relative importance of these elements”.  Indeed it is these very elements in the subjects’ local physical environments that constitute the object in the present activity.

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