©Trimtab Slide 1 Qualitative data  Purpose is to understand rather than measure or prove  Accommodates the emergent properties of real world situations and places findings in context  Data is reduced, analysed and interpreted to derive meaning Attitudes Knowledge Culture Values Feelings Present situation Etc…. Attitudes Knowledge Culture Values Feelings Present situation Etc….

©Trimtab Slide 2  We are in the process of reviewing our teaching in BABS. It would greatly help this process if you would provide us with some feedback on your experiences in BABS courses (these are courses that have the course codes BIOCxxxx, MICRxxxx, BIOS2021 or LIFE2101).  What plan (major) are you undertaking? (e.g. Biotechnology, Molecular Biology, Microbiology/Immunology, Medical Science, Bioinformatics, Nanotechnology).  Based on your experience so far in BABS third year courses, are there courses that you find especially difficult or where you felt that you did not have sufficient background knowledge and/or skills in order to get the most out of the course? If YES, what courses are they and what knowledge and skills did you recall needing in the course but you felt lacking in? (The more specific you can be, the more helpful it will be to the 2nd and 3rd year BABS Teaching Committees).  What features of the 2nd year courses that you undertook were particularly interesting and stimulated your interest in learning? (Again the more specific you can be, the more helpful it will be to the 2nd and 3rd year Teaching Committees.) Which did you find repetitive or boring?  What advice would you offer to the 2nd and 3rd BABS Teaching Committees about specific ways to improve the student transition from Year 2 to Year 3?  What advice would you give to current 2nd year BABS students who are intending to take third year BABS courses in terms of specific skills that will prove especially helpful to them?  Any other comments about the 2nd and 3rd year BABS courses that you would like the Teaching Committees to be aware of?

©Trimtab Slide 3 Managing the data: analysis and interpretation  Identify key themes and patterns: data reduction and display Categorise by: » identifying ideas which appear in the data »Ideas you have already thought of »Ideas which come to you as you are reviewing the data »Ideas which come from your theoretical framework (and lit review) Assign codes to those ideas Review your data and link those codes to the text (i.e. giving evidence to your analysis) Look for relationships among the ideas through the codes, e.g. by using a network diagram Interpret your findings to give meaningful conclusions