Assignment 1 Research Problem Feedback

EDF 5481 READINGS
AND ASSIGNMENTS

ASSIGNMENT ONE SPECS
ASSIGNMENT ONE EXAMPLES
ASSIGNMENT TWO
ASSIGNMENT TWO EXAMPLES

OVERVIEW

EDF 5481 METHODS OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH FALL 2002

GENERAL FEEDBACK ASSIGNMENT ONE
RESEARCH TOPIC STATEMENT

GUIDE 1: INTRODUCTION
GUIDE 2: VARIABLES AND HYPOTHESES
GUIDE 3: RELIABILITY, VALIDITY, CAUSALITY, AND EXPERIMENTS
GUIDE 4: EXPERIMENTS & QUASI-EXPERIMENTS
GUIDE 5: A SURVEY RESEARCH PRIMER
GUIDE 6: FOCUS GROUP BASICS
GUIDE 7: LESS STRUCTURED METHODS
GUIDE 8: ARCHIVES AND DATABASES

This assignment is worth 5 PERCENT toward your final grade.
Remember! I use plus and minus grading on assignments and for the final grade.

This Feedback page is generic. If you feel it does not address your grade on your paper, please make an appointment and we will go over your paper.

Although this assignment does not count very much toward your final grade and although it is the first one of the academic year, it is probably the hardest thing that you will do in Methods this Fall. To do well, you had to really understand what your variables meant and how they are linked together. You could not just say, "I want to study scores on this standardized test" or "I am doing an ethnography."

Assignments 2 and 3 WILL BEGIN WITH A STATEMENT OF THE RESEARCH TOPIC OR "PROBLEM." This way, you will have the opportunity to rewrite this first assignment and the rewritten Research Topic Statement will count about 1/4 of the grade for each of Assignments 2 and 3.

Most papers were quite good and all papers were well-written.

Virtually all papers told me why their research was important to do.

Don't worry about the yellow highlights. I do that the first time that I read over your paper. I highlight the points that I think are central; that way, I am sure to see them when I reread your paper.

If I asked you for a paper of your paper on diskette: please provide in IBM/PC format, in Word or Word Perfect. Please try to make sure the disk is virus free! Thanks!

THE A OR A- PAPER

This paper:

Completed all parts of the assignment. CRITICAL!
Used CONCEPTUAL not OPERATIONAL definitions for the variables.

What's the difference? A conceptual definition tells you what the variable IS or what the variable MEANS. The operational definition is how you measure the concept in practice.

This was the single biggest problem in all the assignments that I read.

Made a clear, concise statement of what THEIR research was going to be about
And did so relatively early in the paper (certainly by the bottom of page one)
And kept citations to a minimum because this assignment was not a literature review

This was the second largest problem in all the assignments. It took too long to get to the research problem and sometimes it was not clear what the focus of the investigation would be.

Correctly identified the independent variables (causes) and the dependent variables (effects).

Did your cause and effect make sense, especially in natural or observational data? Were you able to use one of the guidelines to establish causality? In some cases, it appeared the independent variable was really the effect, instead of the cause. In others, a third variable may have caused the original two.

Had TWO DISTINCT hypotheses; each hypothesis linked only one independent and only one dependent variable. Hypotheses were stated with enough precision that they could be ultimately falsified through empirical observation using operational variables.

This was tied for the second greatest problem. A distinct hypothesis uses either a different independent variable, a different dependent variable, or both. It is not the opposite of the first hypothesis. An hypothesis that examines more than one dependent variable is compounded and is not really testable.

You lost credit if:

Your first and second hypotheses were mirror images of each other, i.e., hypothesis 2 was the opposite of hypothesis 1. (BAD EXAMPLE: (1) Smoking cessation leads to weight gain. (2) Smoking cessation does NOT lead to weight gain. This counts as only ONE hypothesis.)

Your hypothesis was not falsifiable.

Your hypothesis did not state a relationship between the independent and dependent variable. Statements such as "people will be satisfied" do not link independent and dependent variables and are not hypotheses in the typical use of the term.

You did not clearly identify your variables, or did not define them briefly if they were not self-evident (when in doubt, define, because you don't know what someone else's "self-evident" will be.) Words such as "greed" or "sound business practices" are not variables unless they are carefully defined.

You did not define which variables were causes (independent) and which were effects (dependent).

STOP!

DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THE ECOLOGICAL FALLACY?

The ecological fallacy occurs when you try to draw conclusions about individuals from data that are organizational or societal level that occur at about the same point in time. For example, suppose you notice that there is an increase in crime rates and single parent families at about the same time that women's labor force rates increase. Aha! You say. Women going to work outside the home has caused all sorts of horrible, unimaginable things to happen: crime, broken families, and AIDS rates increased at the same time too. However, that assumes it is in the very same families where women take jobs that the children come to crime, families fall apart, and family members even come down with AIDS. In other words, you are drawing conclusions about individuals based on societal level data. In fact, most women with jobs are married, and two income families are higher income families (with lower crime rates).

Moral: in order to draw conclusions about individuals, your data must be at the individual level.

LOOK OVER YOUR ASSIGNMENT. I MADE SEVERAL COMMENTS ON EACH ONE. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO CORRECT ANY PROBLEMS AND RESTATE YOUR RESEARCH TOPIC STATEMENT AT THE BEGINNING OF ASSIGNMENT 2 AND AT THE BEGINNING OF ASSIGNMENT 3.

Susan Carol Losh. September 15 2002.
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EDF 5481 READINGS
AND ASSIGNMENTS OVERVIEW