Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
How I will apply what I have learned in this amazing class :)
Course Description/Objectives:
1. Learn the fundamental terms, concepts, and design characteristics of both quantitative and qualitative educational research.
2. Learn and apply skills to encourage data-driven reflection.
3. Learn to evaluate the methodological procedures that an author followed.
4. Learn to evaluate the results that were reported.
5. Learn to evaluate the practical significance of a study.
6. Be able to comprehend common research designs, methods, and procedures.
7. Be able to communicate the research results clearly, concisely, logically and in a coherent manner.
8. Be able to design your own research investigations.
9. Compare and contrast quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to research.
10. Explain what experimental, quasi-experimental and non-experimental research designs entail and describe their application to different research questions.
11. Explain descriptive statistical techniques such as measure of central tendency, standard deviation and correlation.
12. Explain the ethical principles that pertain to research involving human subjects and research conducted in educational settings.
13. Select a research problem and formulate appropriate research hypotheses and/or questions.
14. Conduct a review of educational literature from texts, journals and computer library databases.
15. Write a coherent synthesis of such literature as it relates to the research problem.
16. Prepare a viable research proposal.
How I will use them in my future career as a School Counselor:
There are two scenarios that I am certain will occur as a school counselor: (A) I will have a student bring a problem to me that I know nothing about and (B) I will have to show through collected data that what I do as a counselor matters, among other scenarios. All 16 of the objectives listed above will be useful for these situations.
A. If a student comes to me with a problem that I have no knowledge of, then it is my responsibility to learn as much as I can in order to sere that student to the best of my ability. In order to do that, I will have to be able to read articles concerning the topic at hand. I could go to a search engine and type in the problem and hope that the articles I start reading are relevant... or I could take the evaluation skills I have learned (Obj. 3, 4, & 5) and find articles that really are relevant, valid, and reliable in order to learn from them. Even then, finding research that is relevant is useless unless I understand what is being said, which I now have more clear of an understand of what everything means within a research article (Obj. 1 & 6). Hopefully I will find the information that I need and be able to reflect on it (Obj. 2) and use it to help the students that I counsel. Another part to is this is being able to tell the student that information is out there as well and if I create an intervention of some sort for my students based on research I have found, I will be able to clearly and easily communicate to my supervisor what I have learned and prove that there is reason behind my proposals.
All of this is extremely important mostly because there is no way I will know everything about every problem presented to me, especially in my first years as a counselor. I will have a lack of experience, but I can learn through the experience and research of others, and thanks to this class, I will rarely waste my time reading articles that I don't need.
B. Sadly counselors, especially here in Virginia, due to the acceptance of federal help financially, we have to submit proof that we are useful to the school. Teachers and schools in general have had these evaluations for years and it is all based on the quantitative grade and test score information. As counselors, it is sometimes hard to quantify the help that we give to students. I believe that counselors are crucial for teaching social and life skills that are just as important as academics, and to be there for students that are going through issues that are difficult to handle. However, saying this to the higher ups is not enough to prove that I do my job well and that I make a difference in children's lives. Therefore, we have to be creative and formulate ways to quantify our work. From what I have learned, most counselors are doing this through pretest-posttest data collection.
In order to create the research I must have an understanding of research terms and what not just like in the first scenario. This also includes being able to compare and contrast ninja, pirate, and nirate methods (Obj. 9) and explaining why I am using experimental, non-experimental, or quasi-experimental designs (Obj. 10). When thinking about how to go about creating this research design, I will have to keep in mind all of the ethical standards that I must follow in order to keep the students safe (and my job safe!) (Obj. 12). From there, I would go through the appropriate steps of completing and writing up my research including formulating the problem and question, as well as completing a literature review and summarize the information as it is relevant to the topic of research (Obj. 13, 14, & 15). Most importantly, I will be able to give and explain descriptive statistics (Obj. 11) from my research which (hopefully) will all be positive and prove that I am useful to the school that I work for. This is one reason why I believe the skills I have learned in order to think of and prepare viable research is extremely important to my future.
Oh, and of course, it will help me get through my graduate classes! :)
1. Learn the fundamental terms, concepts, and design characteristics of both quantitative and qualitative educational research.
2. Learn and apply skills to encourage data-driven reflection.
3. Learn to evaluate the methodological procedures that an author followed.
4. Learn to evaluate the results that were reported.
5. Learn to evaluate the practical significance of a study.
6. Be able to comprehend common research designs, methods, and procedures.
7. Be able to communicate the research results clearly, concisely, logically and in a coherent manner.
8. Be able to design your own research investigations.
9. Compare and contrast quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to research.
10. Explain what experimental, quasi-experimental and non-experimental research designs entail and describe their application to different research questions.
11. Explain descriptive statistical techniques such as measure of central tendency, standard deviation and correlation.
12. Explain the ethical principles that pertain to research involving human subjects and research conducted in educational settings.
13. Select a research problem and formulate appropriate research hypotheses and/or questions.
14. Conduct a review of educational literature from texts, journals and computer library databases.
15. Write a coherent synthesis of such literature as it relates to the research problem.
16. Prepare a viable research proposal.
How I will use them in my future career as a School Counselor:
There are two scenarios that I am certain will occur as a school counselor: (A) I will have a student bring a problem to me that I know nothing about and (B) I will have to show through collected data that what I do as a counselor matters, among other scenarios. All 16 of the objectives listed above will be useful for these situations.
A. If a student comes to me with a problem that I have no knowledge of, then it is my responsibility to learn as much as I can in order to sere that student to the best of my ability. In order to do that, I will have to be able to read articles concerning the topic at hand. I could go to a search engine and type in the problem and hope that the articles I start reading are relevant... or I could take the evaluation skills I have learned (Obj. 3, 4, & 5) and find articles that really are relevant, valid, and reliable in order to learn from them. Even then, finding research that is relevant is useless unless I understand what is being said, which I now have more clear of an understand of what everything means within a research article (Obj. 1 & 6). Hopefully I will find the information that I need and be able to reflect on it (Obj. 2) and use it to help the students that I counsel. Another part to is this is being able to tell the student that information is out there as well and if I create an intervention of some sort for my students based on research I have found, I will be able to clearly and easily communicate to my supervisor what I have learned and prove that there is reason behind my proposals.
All of this is extremely important mostly because there is no way I will know everything about every problem presented to me, especially in my first years as a counselor. I will have a lack of experience, but I can learn through the experience and research of others, and thanks to this class, I will rarely waste my time reading articles that I don't need.
B. Sadly counselors, especially here in Virginia, due to the acceptance of federal help financially, we have to submit proof that we are useful to the school. Teachers and schools in general have had these evaluations for years and it is all based on the quantitative grade and test score information. As counselors, it is sometimes hard to quantify the help that we give to students. I believe that counselors are crucial for teaching social and life skills that are just as important as academics, and to be there for students that are going through issues that are difficult to handle. However, saying this to the higher ups is not enough to prove that I do my job well and that I make a difference in children's lives. Therefore, we have to be creative and formulate ways to quantify our work. From what I have learned, most counselors are doing this through pretest-posttest data collection.
In order to create the research I must have an understanding of research terms and what not just like in the first scenario. This also includes being able to compare and contrast ninja, pirate, and nirate methods (Obj. 9) and explaining why I am using experimental, non-experimental, or quasi-experimental designs (Obj. 10). When thinking about how to go about creating this research design, I will have to keep in mind all of the ethical standards that I must follow in order to keep the students safe (and my job safe!) (Obj. 12). From there, I would go through the appropriate steps of completing and writing up my research including formulating the problem and question, as well as completing a literature review and summarize the information as it is relevant to the topic of research (Obj. 13, 14, & 15). Most importantly, I will be able to give and explain descriptive statistics (Obj. 11) from my research which (hopefully) will all be positive and prove that I am useful to the school that I work for. This is one reason why I believe the skills I have learned in order to think of and prepare viable research is extremely important to my future.
Oh, and of course, it will help me get through my graduate classes! :)
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
So far so good..
My progress with the research design is not as far as I would have hoped at this point in the semester. I have successfully found numerous articles to source my literature review and I have read through many of them, highlighting important information as I go. However, the lit review still stands as just that... bits and pieces within articles and not yet compiled nicely into the lit review section.
The population for my design is quite small and would be collected through criterion sampling within the school that the researching counselor is working at. The information gained could not be generalized, but is beneficial to the counselor in order to provide services for the students that he or she is responsible for. This makes the design very small, but I believe it can be extremely useful when trying to create programs and groups for these students.
The threats to internal validity concerning my research question is a section that I am unsure of. The blog post about the threats will be helpful, but I have to actually sit down and look into it a bit more after I have everything else figured out in my paper.
I am hoping that by the end of this week I will have substantially more done with the paper. I plan on having it turned in before the Thanksgiving break for review. I just haven't been able to get myself in gear so far. We'll see how it goes.
The population for my design is quite small and would be collected through criterion sampling within the school that the researching counselor is working at. The information gained could not be generalized, but is beneficial to the counselor in order to provide services for the students that he or she is responsible for. This makes the design very small, but I believe it can be extremely useful when trying to create programs and groups for these students.
The threats to internal validity concerning my research question is a section that I am unsure of. The blog post about the threats will be helpful, but I have to actually sit down and look into it a bit more after I have everything else figured out in my paper.
I am hoping that by the end of this week I will have substantially more done with the paper. I plan on having it turned in before the Thanksgiving break for review. I just haven't been able to get myself in gear so far. We'll see how it goes.
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