Introduction to Education Research

0.5 Course Units

This course is designed as a seminar that will introduce incoming Mid- Career doctoral students to reading, critiquing, and conceptualizing rigorous research in education. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods examples of thoughtful, systematic, and well-executed research will be carefully examined. These texts will be analyzed in detail as a way to prepare students to understand and synthesize such research in their professional lives, other coursework, and later, for their dissertations and in their leadership as a whole. In particular, students will learn about the construction of effective research questions, the major quantitative and qualitative approaches to educational research, and what inferences can (and cannot) be made from the most common research designs. Students will also examine assumptions that underlay research questions in terms of sets of relationships between core concepts and processes, correlation, causation, and so on. Spring 0.5 Course Units