It’s not so common for Masters level students in the MET to undertake their own original research but one of our first tasks in ETEC500 was to complete the Government of Canada’s CORE tutorial on research ethics. This was a great introduction to the very important decisions researchers have to make before being able to conduct studies involving participants. The three focuses in the CORE tutorial are: Respect for Persons, Concern for Welfare, and Justice.

In this task, we were asked to assess the role of action research in terms of its methodological value. We explored issues like generalizability and transferability of action research, how researcher influence might affect the interpretation of the results of the research, and how we can draw conclusions and implications from action research studies. I felt it was most interesting to consider how action research might be used in conjunction with other larger scale studies.

In this task, we were asked to analyze one study that used qualitative methods to establish a finding. This was one of the most challenging parts of the course for me since I have a more than passing familiarity with quantitative research, but none in qualitative studies. Doing this analysis was duly humbling as a result. The task involved breaking down the stages of the qualitative study in order to identify and validate the research methods to determine how ‘good’ the study was.

The entirety of assignment 1 revolved around one article given to all of us in the class. We were given specific parts of the research design to look for and assess in the article. In part A, we were looking at what kind of study it was and how we knew, for example, whether it was theory based or quantitative. In part B, we moved on to identifying the study’s constructs, variable and hypotheses. I really enjoyed this as it reminded me of my previous methods training at McGill and it’s also not often you get the luxury of truly pulling apart of piece of research to see what it’s made of.

Assignments 1C & 1D went even further by asking us to look at how the researchers established controls in the study, how they derived their sample population, and how they measured their variables. I think operationalization of variables into practical measurement is one of the most difficult parts of designing research and so I was excited to be able to think about this problem for this paper. Last, we analyzed the study looking at its merits and deficits. I thought about the contribution the study made to the wider literature and how the researchers framed their conclusions. This was easily the hardest part.

Our last assignment in the course was somewhat similar to assignment A in that we were analyzing and critiquing a piece of educational research. I’d mostly been choosing experimental research to consider throughout the course so I chose to look at a quasi-experimental study on the effect of feedback on student participation in online learning programs. The analysis I conducted was extensive and looked at every component of what was a reasonably detailed study with 8 hypotheses being tested. I found that while I enjoyed, as usual, picking apart the design components, I had a lot of difficulty in organizing my thoughts and keeping to the word limit.