Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Designing and interpreting research about education. Introduction to survey techniques, correlational designs, classic experimental and evaluation designs for investigating causal relations, case study methods, interpretive approaches to research. Students with credit for EDUC 814 may not take this course for further credit. Equivalent Courses: EDUC814

COURSE DETAILS:

A broad introduction to research design in educational contexts, this course will enable students use and critique the research of others, as well as design and conduct simple research of their own. Students will learn to conduct sound literature reviews, practice developing reliable, valid and ethical research tools and processes, and work together on simple data analysis. Most research examples provided have been chosen to support the interests and needs of students within the Educational Technology and Learning Design program. The implications of positivist, interpretative and integrative orientations for research design will be discussed. Both qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods will be reviewed.

TOPICS

• Research purposes and questions
• The role of literature review in the research process
• Research relationships, including:
  • Ethics
  • Self research
  • Community research
• Research approaches, methods and strategies within four broad categories:
  • Interventions (e.g. design-based reserach, experiments, usability studies)
  • Close-up studies (e.g. case-study, ethnography)
  • Large-scale studies (e.g. survey studies, large corpuses of computer trace data)
  • Program evaluation

SEMESTER-LONG PROJECT

Each student will work on a project to evaluate and/or design research related to an area of personal interest. This project will be broken down into four parts:

• Milestone 1: Identify a topic of interest and an initial seed article
• Milestone 2: Conduct and report on a literature search related to the topic to find 10-12 sources related to it
• Milestone 3: Produce annotations for three of the sources found and use the feedback to produce an annotated bibliography
• Final paper: Craft either a literature analysis or a study design informed by the literature reviewed; include the annotated bibliography of the 10-12 sources as an appendix

CLASSWORK

Live class sessions are devoted to exploring course topics and practice with research methods. Assigned readings will be discussed, core ideas expanding beyond or connecting between the readings will be provided and some sessions will involve guest speakers. For some weeks, students will submit short reading responses before class to inform discussion. Threaded throughout the term, the class will work on simple means of data collection, analysis and display together during class time. Students will collaboratively design three data collection tools: A questionnaire, an interview guide and an observation protocol. They will collect data from each other and use that data to practice simple ways of managing, analyzing and displaying data, including descriptive statistics and analysis of open-ended written responses. This work will be done almost entirely during the live class.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

At the end of this course students will be able to:

1. Explain the range of purposes and uses of research in educational settings and how they relate to choices among research approaches and methods.
2. Identify the complex relationships between researchers, research participants and the phenomena studied, how these shape research design and inform ethical practice.
3. Explain differences among a variety of approaches to educational research based on their assumptions, purposes, relational stances and typical methods/procedures.
4. Identify the possibilities and limitations of different research methods, both qualitative and quantitative, in the service of particular research goals and purposes.
5. Critique research: Critically evaluate studies that employ different research models and methods on topics relating to educational technology and learning design.
6. Use research: Identify, interpret, and analyze the existing research literature on an issue/topic of personal interest.
7. Design research: Craft a simple research plan related to that issue/topic of personal interest.
8. Do research: Design and implement simple data collection and analysis procedures (e.g. questionnaire design, journal keeping, descriptive statistics, simple emergent and a priori coding of qualitative data).

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Students should have access to a desktop, laptop or tablet computer and a fast enough internet connection to download and upload course files, assignments and assessments on Canvas. Some of these files may include video, but nothing larger a half-hour Hollywood-quality TV show.

REQUIRED READING: