Strengthening the Organizing of Articles Readings among Graduate Students to Support their Construction of Research Proposals

Abstract

The use of proper and appropriate technology can help graduate students’ in developmental and constructive writing. The editing and refining processes involved in the writing can either be carried out individually or in small groups. These processes are helpful for novice education researchers to work on and build their research proposals. Their ability to organize information based on their reading of articles, as well as organizing the identified information systematically, is essential for writing a research proposal.A study was conducted to look at the thinking of graduate students on the use of a learning template that was developed by the researchers and used in the Research Methodology classes. This template, called the Organizing Article Review Template (OART), contains elements or focus to organize students' thinking and writing when they are reading research articles. A total of 34Master students, four Research Methodology course instructors, and 16 Master students’ Project Paper supervisors from the Faculty of Education of a public university in the North of Peninsular Malaysia were involved in the study entrenched within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The data for this qualitative study was obtained from semi-structured interviews with all the research participants and from students’ reflective writing. The findings of the study show the positive acceptance of students towards the use of templates to organize their reading of articles. The template trained them to focus on reading and selecting appropriate and relevant information in the articles. The use of technology tools such as computers, smart and android phones, as well as appropriate computer programs (for example Words, Excel, and Google docs) were very helpful in supporting the use of OART,which had contributed and helped them to further strengthened their process of writing the research proposals. Editing the components of the proposals was made more practical when using the OART to compare and contrast the identified information from the articles. This study contributes to the facilitation of Master’s students towards being more systematically organized in their thinking when quoting important information from the articles. The use of the OART had also aided them be more confident and critical in writing their research proposals.