I. COURSE DESIGN - for Gall, Gall, and Borg Educational Research A...

Instructor Manual and Test Bank for Gall, Gall, and Borg Educational Research An Introduction Eighth Edition by Meredith D. Gall Joyce P. Gall 1 / 4

COURSE DESIGN

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I. COURSE DESIGN

Organization of the Instructor's Manual

The purpose of this manual is to provide ideas and resources for teaching a course on educational research using the

textbook Educational Research: An Introduction, 8th edition.

In this first section of the manual, we present ideas and to consider in course design. In addition to a sample syllabus and a form for outlining a research proposal, a new feature in this eighth edition of the Instructor's Manual are a set of teaching activities geared to the course as a whole. The second section of the manual is a test item file containing closed-form and open-form test items, application problems, and specific teaching activities for each of the 18 chapters of the textbook.

Factors to Consider in Designing a Course on Educational Research

Syllabus

Exhibit A, which appears near the end of this section of the manual, presents a syllabus that one of the authors (M.Gall) used in teaching a graduate course (a doctoral-level course that also included a few master's level students) using Educational Research: An Introduction as the course text. It is provided as a possible starting point to help you design your course on educational research and the syllabus for that course.

Content Coverage

Educational Research: An Introduction, 8th edition, contains 18 chapters and approximately 650 pages of text. This may well be too much content for students to master in a quarter-system course or even a semester-long course. If so, you can select some of the chapters to cover during the course and suggest to students that they read the other chapters after the course as the information becomes relevant to their research endeavors. In fact, instructors tell us that many students hold on to the textbook after they take the course and use it as a reference work. The glossary and the expanded coverage of research topics in the eighth edition (especially in the areas of proposal writing, literature review, and qualitative research) should make the book even more useful for this purpose.

Another approach to content coverage is to provide instruction on all or most of the chapters of the textbook but to assign only certain sections of each chapter. For example, the chapter on correlational research presents basic correlational designs in the first part of the chapter and more sophisticated designs (e.g., path analysis and hierarchical linear modeling) and statistical issues later in the chapter. You might require students to read only the first part of the chapter and then provide an overview in class of the material covered in later parts of the chapter. If you decide on this approach to content coverage, you can refer to the detailed table of contents in the textbook to decide which topics in each chapter to cover.

In contrast, the top-down approach involves starting the course by helping students develop the "big picture" of educational research. Later in the course you can help them fill in the details. Following this approach, you might start off with Chapters 1 and 2, which together help students develop an understanding of how research differs from other forms of inquiry and what is involved in doing a research study. Next, you might assign students to read Chapter 4 (Reviewing the Literature) and have them conduct a small-scale literature review on a topic of your or their choice. This will give them a feeling for what completed research studies look like, even if they don’t understand all the research terminology and procedures involved. Because this is an initial foray into the research literature, you might have them read only abstracts, such as those in the ERIC database, rather than complete journal articles. The next step would be to assign chapters that present complete research designs, for example, descriptive and causal- 2 / 4

EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH: AN INTRODUCTION

2 comparative designs (Chapter 10), experimental designs (Chapter 12), case study research (Chapter 14),and action research (Chapter 18). Then you could teach particular aspects of the research process, such as sampling (Chapter 6) and collecting data with questionnaires and interviews (Chapter 8).

We do not know whether the top-down or bottom-up approach is superior. However, we are fairly certain that you need to focus on both the "big picture" and specialized procedures in order for students to develop a strong initial understanding of educational research.

Homework

The closed-form items, open-form items, and application problems within the test item file in this manual can be given as homework assignments. The application problems are particularly appropriate for this purpose. Also, there are a number of closed-form and open-form items for most of the objectives in each textbook chapter. Therefore, you might consider assigning some of the items for particular objectives as homework and using the other items for the same objectives in tests that will be graded.

When assigning textbook chapters for students to read as homework, you might advise them to read the objectives at the start of each textbook chapter before studying the chapter. After reading the chapter, students can check their mastery of the chapter by returning to the objectives and checking whether they can remember the concepts, procedures, and ideas associated with each objective. Students also can check their mastery of the textbook content by completing the self-check test at the end of each chapter.

You might advise students to take special note of the terms that are bold-faced in each chapter. Many of these terms are the subject of the closed-form and open-form items in this manual. Each boldfaced term is defined in the text of the chapter and also in the glossary at the end of the textbook.Some instructors aim to encourage students ' personal response to research methodology. If this is one of your goals, you may wish to give students an assignment involving their writing a personal journal of reflections on their textbook readings.

Instruction in Statistics

Statistical analysis is an integral part of quantitative research. Even in qualitative research, descriptive statistics sometimes play a role. Also, in designing a qualitative study, the researcher will need to conduct a review of the literature, which is likely to include some quantitative studies. Students need to understand statistics in order to integrate these studies into their literature review.

Some students might have taken a course on statistical analysis prior to a research methods course. This is a desirable background to have before taking a course on research methods, unless the instructor focused on teaching statistical computations rather than helping students understand the role of statistics in research design. You might recommend that the students review their statistics textbook and notes as they encounter previously learned statistical procedures in the chapter on statistical techniques in Educational Research: An Introduction, 8th edition.

Many students benefit by taking a statistics course and a research course concurrently. Because the content of these two types of course overlaps to some extent, the students thus have an opportunity to see both statistics and research methods from different perspectives. Also, exposure to statistics in two courses during the same quarter or semester might facilitate a deeper understanding of statistical thinking.

If some students in your course have no background in statistics, you might wish to consider alternative ways for them to catch up with your students in the course who have some background in statistics. Among the options to consider are peer tutoring and independent study of a statistics textbook. If none of the students have had prior training in statistics, you can move through certain chapters of Educational Research: An Introduction (especially, Chapters 10-13) more slowly. Also, you can place particular emphasis on Chapter 5, which provides an overview of statistical techniques. 3 / 4

COURSE DESIGN

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Assessment of Student Learning

One method of testing that we have found works well with graduate students is to assign take-home tests consisting of application problems, such as those we include in the test item file. These problems are sufficiently complex and open-ended that various responses are possible. You can allow students to study the problems together but require them to write individual responses to each problem. This procedure encourages students to think about the textbook content in depth, without the possible anxiety generated by the prospect of taking a sit-down test. Also, this procedure gives students the opportunity to work both collaboratively (they can study the problems together) and independently (they must write their own responses to each problem on the test).

Note to the Instructor

We welcome feedback on any of the ideas presented in this manual or in the textbook Educational Research: An Introduction, 8th edition. You can write to Meredith (Mark) at: University of Oregon, College of Education, Eugene, OR 97403, or to either Mark or Joyce (Joy) Gall at 4810 Mahalo Drive, Eugene, OR 97405. Alternatively, you can

write to us at our e-mail addresses: [email protected]; [email protected]

Teaching Activities That Involve Having Students Prepare a Research Proposal

A large part of constructing a building involves creating a blueprint. The blueprint is, in part, a visual representation of construction details, In addition, it represents many design elements, each of which was created in response to the occupants’ intended uses of the building and constraints such as budget, building codes, and weight loads.

In a similar manner, a research proposal is a blueprint for the actual conduct of a study. If the proposal is flawed, so will be the process of data collection, data analysis, and conclusions that can be drawn from the results. If the proposal is conceptually sound and sufficiently detailed, it is likely that the study can be successfully executed and will make a contribution to research knowledge. The proposal might not anticipate every problem that will arise as it is executed, but it should be able to anticipate most of them and state appropriate precautions and checks to ensure conduct of rigorous and sound research.

If you are teaching a course on research methods using our book as a resource, you might consider having students develop a proposal on a research problem of their choice, using the form in Exhibit B as a guide. In our many years of teaching a research-methods course for students who will be expected to complete a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation, we have found that this approach is valuable. Students develop a strong understanding of educational research by creating a proposal concurrently with reading chapters in the book. They appreciate this proposal- writing activity, because they realize that they actually need to create a proposal as part of the thesis or dissertation process.The form in Exhibit B is helpful because it points students to key elements that must be specified in the proposal.However, that purpose in creating the form was not to require student to create a full-blown proposal of 20 or more pages. Rather, its intent is to help students produce a “sketch” of a proposal. A sketch contains key elements of the research proposal, but its advantage is that it can be revised quickly as students get new ideas or respond to feedback from others. Furthermore, because a sketch does not require substantial effort, students will find it easy to abandon if they develop a new research problem that they find more compelling and doable. A proposal sketch might be only three to five pages and can be written in outline form with brief statements describing each design element.

The following are suggestions about how to use the form in Exhibit B as you assign each chapter of the book. We recommend that you take a few minutes now to read these chapter-by-chapter suggestions in order to get a sense of our approach. As you read them you might find activities that you like, or you might find that they serve as springboards for generating other activities that better suit your students and instructional purposes.

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