EDS 8824 Analysis and Evaluation of Research

This course is designed to enable students to become critical consumers and evaluators of current educational research. Students will develop skills necessary to identify, understand, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of educational research. Throughout the course, students will locate and evaluate a collection of educational research publications and write a critical, scholarly literature review focused in a specific area of education.

Credits

3

Student Learning Outcomes

After successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Distinguish different types of quantitative and qualitative research, especially as they relate to addressing educational problems in practice
• Understand the purpose and standards for excellence for each section in a research paper
• Articulate strengths and weaknesses of research studies to understand when to use trustworthy empirical information to improve educational practice
• Draw the appropriate inferences from various research findings
• Evaluate research studies on interventions that may be used or proposed for use in their own schools
• Identify threats to internal and external validity in quantitative research, and credibility and trustworthiness in qualitative research
• Gather research about a practice in your area of content certification, evaluate what the research says, and discuss whether research on this practice is in alignment with what you see in your specific educational context