Constructivism
Participant accounts are interpreted as situated meanings shaped by experience, role, language, and institutional context.
Dissertation Methodology
Constructivist qualitative inquiry.
The study uses a qualitative-dominant convergent mixed methods design grounded in constructivism. It asks how participants make sense of generative AI in teaching and learning, then uses supporting quantitative evidence to place those accounts in structural context.
The questions, evidence, and analysis perform distinct jobs.
Sensemaking
Participants notice cues in ambiguous conditions, interpret them through available frames, form plausible accounts, and act on those accounts.
Mixed methods
Qualitative evidence addresses meaning directly. Closed-ended survey items and national datasets provide supporting descriptive and structural context.
Human meaning remains central
- Classroom-facing educators
- Building-level administrators
- District or system-level leaders
- Adult university students
- Interviews, card-sort explanations, documents, and open-ended survey responses
Other evidence keeps its proper status
- Closed-ended educator survey items provide descriptive patterns
- NCES and RAND datasets provide structural context
- AI-generated texts and agentic artifacts provide a distinct nonparticipant comparison
- At least one bounded, prespecified agentic-artifact task is retained if other comparison elements are scaled
- AI-generated texts and agentic artifacts are never treated as evidence about human experience
Sensemaking drives what the study asks.
RQ1 How do classroom-facing educators, building-level administrators, district or system-level leaders, and adult university students make sense of the ways generative AI changes the effort, dialogue, authorship, judgment, and participation involved in teaching and learning?
RQ2 How do educators and school-system leaders make sense of and respond to the policy, professional-learning, assessment, access, and governance conditions surrounding generative AI?
RQ3 What language, assessment expectations, instructional practices, professional supports, and leadership approaches do educators and school-system leaders identify as important for preserving forms of friction that support learning while reducing unnecessary barriers?
Interpretive thematic analysis in two passes.
First pass
Initial coding stays close to participant language, actions, and meanings. Reflexive memos record how the researcher's experience and assumptions shape interpretation.
Second pass
Related codes are developed into themes across roles and sources. The framework may organize attention, but inductive themes, discrepant accounts, and silence can revise it.
Peer debriefing, negative and discrepant evidence, transparent memos, and comparison across evidence sources support credibility. No mechanical percentage threshold determines whether a theme or framework revision matters.
One-sentence answer
“I use constructivist qualitative inquiry because the study asks how people make meaning under ambiguous educational conditions, while the qualitative-dominant mixed methods design allows interviews and other open-ended evidence to remain central and uses quantitative evidence for supporting context.”
The references behind this alignment
| Crotty, M. (1998). The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process. SAGE. |
| Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994). Competing paradigms in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 105-117). SAGE. |
| Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic Inquiry. SAGE. |
| Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101. |
| Maitlis, S., & Christianson, M. (2014). Sensemaking in organizations: Taking stock and moving forward. Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 57-125. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2014.873177 |
| Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409-421. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133 |