Ed research basics

November 18, 2007 at 5:22 pm | In Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Here, you will find Carol’s presentation and handout. (to come)

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  1. Carol,
    I really enjoyed your delivery on educational research basics. Even though your title ended with “basics” you touched on many important aspects of educational research. Your knowledge about the topic is clearly outstanding. I had taken the educational research course last semester(spring) but I got a lot more understanding from your delivery that complement my prior knowledge. I have no doubt you can teach the class. Again your knowledge and confidence is a very good motivating factor for your listeners, you got my attention.

    Comment by bolutbte415 — November 24, 2007 #

  2. To follow up on Bolu’s comment: I find that with certain topics, I don’t grasp them the first time that I hear them, or I don’t fully encode it into my longterm memory just from a formal presentation. Instead, I need to have follow-up discussions or less formal presentations of the information, where I get to play with the ideas a little and kick them around until they start to click for me. For example, I had taken ed research courses, but not until a year later, when a seminar professor stopped the discussion and asked for a definition of what a quasi-experiment was, did I fully understand the concept. I was the one who answered the professor’s question, and I hadn’t had any intervening instruction on the topic, but just being asked to think it through and explain it got me to make the concept fully operational in my mind. I find this to be true for technical / abstract concepts: statistics, research designs, programming, etc. Only after I mess around with it and put it into different contexts does it become accessible / useful information. I think this is the value of (a) hearing things more than once, (b) having discussions and not just lectures, and (c) having applied tasks, such as project work that involves the concept. And I agree that Carol’s presentation did a good job of packaging information in an accessible way.

    Comment by tchammond — November 26, 2007 #

  3. I agree, definitely a job well done with the presentation. It is funny because it really reminded me what it takes to have a legitimate research project and to take anything away from its results. It’s amazing that any true large scale research projects ever get off the ground. We see/read articles all the time that are based on “surveys and statistics” (newspapers, Internet sites, TV, etc.) and I always wonder the methods behind them. The nature of critical thinking, I guess. I would venture that a large amount of them probably aren’t really ‘valid’. Because information nowadays is disseminated so fast and people are so inclined to believe everything they read or see on TV (especially in the newspaper or in the news shows), they can create a hysteria and/or a whole lot of falacies, or other unintended consequences.

    Comment by Trish — November 26, 2007 #

  4. Your presentation was very well thought out and you definitely showed the many difficulties and processes you need to go through for ed research. It was amazing to see the scale of ed research and the scale of work you need to go through to put together a truely useful research project to get useful data from your research. Good job explaining a complicated topic.

    Comment by Patricia — November 26, 2007 #

  5. Research will become part of our lives, whether or not we are in Ph.D. programs. I currently serve in a huge initiative called Achieving the Dream. This initiative is grant funded and it strives to close the achievement gap among Minority students and Whites, as well as low income students. Everything we do is research-based. Data is being collected and this data is being analyzed. Currently I am running a pilot course and I am collecting data to analyze at a later time. Whether we like it or not, good, effective decisions are made if backed by research.

    Comment by Alex Rolón — November 26, 2007 #


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