Reflection on Assignment 2 - EER500

I have just submitted my second and final assignment for EER500 - Introduction to Educational Research. It is a little before the due date but as I have an assignment for ETL503 due on the same day, I need to get cracking with it.

The second assignment for EER500 involved taking our research question from the first assignment and selecting a research design and research methods as a sort of mini-research-proposal. I am still blown away by the amount of information I needed to read and understand. Research planning is a very complex task and I can understand now why it may take years, even decades for a research plan to be completed.

In choosing the research design and methods we were asked to look at the strengths and limitations of various designs and justify why we chose what we did. In the first assignment I got the idea that a good research question sets the context for the research so firstly I looked back at my research problem and question. I don't feel that I had much choice in selecting a research design - it was my question that chose the design. In summary I looked at the features of quantitative and qualitative research strategies and what my question was telling me. After selecting quantitative I looked at the different types of quantitative research design and again, looked at what my question was telling me. Was it asking for descriptive or experimental research?

Next I looked at the different types of experimental research - a choice between the laboratory experiment or the quasi-experiment, choosing quasi-experiment for reasons set out in my assignment. Further on, I had to consider what data-collection strategies I would involve and why? I went with a pre-intervention questionnaire, intervention through professional development and then a post-intervention questionnaire. By no means was that all there was to it.

We had to look at ethical issues as well and note what ethical considerations we might need for our research. We also had to work out what research paradigm our particular methods and design followed. It was heavy stuff!

What have I learned?

Where do I start? I think the work about research paradigms has had the most impact on me. At first I was thinking why on earth do we need to consider this stuff? But through my readings I discovered how relevant it is to research, indeed, how relevant it is to how you approach so many things. More details on this in my next post: What's my paradigm?

Also I have become very aware that research is not conducted in a vacuum. The results of educational research influence how people think and consider education topics and issues. It can produce change in procedures and methods. For these reasons it is imperative that researchers do their utmost to produce quality, ethical research, that is free from the bias of their own and others assumptions about social reality.

Critical Reflection EER500 - Assignment 1

Well if I'm writing a critical reflection for one assignment, I might as well do it for another.

Assignment one for EER500 - Introduction to educational research, was different to any other assignment I've had to do. First of all, it was divided into parts 1a and 1b. Our course work also centred around this assignment. (It was so great not to have to keep following course work while also trying to complete an assignment - all lecturers take note!) We had to select a media article to do with an area of interest. Find 2 to 3 journal articles/studies about the area of interest in the media article. Formulate a research question (based on our module readings) and write about how the research question was related to the literature. Next we had to publish our writing onto a wiki.

For part b of the assignment, we had to read all the wiki posts in our section. Select one relevant to us professionally/personally (as well as our own), and read all the articles to familiarise ourselves with the area. Next with reference to our text and other readings we had to identify and comment on strengths and areas for improvement of the draft research question and the statement of how the question related to the literature, and the practical importance of the research question. Whewww! It took me a while to work out (from the forum posts and assignment info) that what we were doing was a type of critical evaluation (in a positive sense) of our own and the other wiki post and to back up any of our comments with references. Thinking of it like that made it a little easier for me to understand how to go about it.

I read alot about formulating research papers and research questions and literature reviews, and eventually managed to work out what was a good research question and how to effectively connect it to the literature. This whole process was a bit unerving for me because the assignment guidelines seemed to be so broad. Tell me to write a critical analysis on an author's view on a certain subject and I'll have no problems but in this assignment it felt like there was so much we had to work out for ourselves (like what is a good research question and so on). I find open-ended stuff so much harder to deal with, probably because I doubt my own abilities so much.

There was so much that I learnt from this assignment though. Like how most research reports give you ideas for further research if you know where to look and how the research question shapes the whole research process so you really have to get it right! The fact that researchers constantly revise their questions and research design. I'm finding that a bit hard to get used to.

EER500 Introduction to Educational Research

Well, I have begun my second and third subjects for Master Ed (TL) and after much research and deliberation I think I have settled on an area of interest for my assignment. One of the articles we had to read for ETL 503 (Resourcing the Curriculum) is Doug Johnson's "Libraries for a post-literate society". http://www2.curriculum.edu.au/verve/_resources/connections_72.pdf
I have always been interested in how digital technology is affecting education and society and Doug's article really got me thinking. Also Australia's literacy levels have declined over the last decade (one of the few in the OECD according to PISA (http://www.pisa.oecd.org/pages/0,2987,en_32252351_32235731_1_1_1_1_1,00.html) and after a bit on online research I think I would like to find out more as to what connections there may be between literacy levels and digital technology. I also wonder how this may affect TLs and school libraries. More on this later...