Introductory Methods Course Research Articles

Cultivating Qualitative Researchers: Lessons Learned During a Pandemic

Under the best of circumstances, learning to conduct qualitative research is challenging, both intellectually and emotionally. Engaging in such learning in difficult situations, such as a global pandemic, may heighten challenges while creating opportunities for truly deep learning. The purpose of this paper is to provide methodological insights to guide the growth of new qualitative researchers and inform the design of introductory methods courses based on the learning experiences of a group of graduate students conducting their first qualitative research projects. We present students’ experiences with choosing and planning a project, navigating relationships with study participants, and conducting observations and interviews. Explicit connections to qualitative methodology are offered for every stage of student research engagement. An analysis of the student authors’ experiences highlights the associated learning and innovation necessary to adapt to adversity when conducting qualitative research. Advancements in research reciprocity and human connection are presented, as experienced by the student authors. We conclude with implications and insights for teaching and learning qualitative research and ethical considerations that transcend pandemic circumstances. It is the intent of this manuscript to support the development of deep reflexive practice for new qualitative researchers, effective instructional approaches for those who teach research methods, and an insight into the power of diverse student researchers learning new skills together for the global research community.

Between race-evasiveness and the pursuit of racial competence: Secondary mathematics preservice teachers’ understandings of race in an introductory methods course

The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the ways that preservice teachers, in their first mathematics education course, understood race in mathematics classrooms. Through a qualitative document analysis of course assignments, we identify three ways students wrote about race: using race-evasive maneuvers to avoid discussion of race in mathematics education, skimming past racial issues in ways that reduced their importance, and directly engaging with race in the active pursuit of racial competence. Our results suggest ways that critical mathematics topics can encourage students to begin this pursuit and underscore the need for intentionally antiracist-oriented mathematics teacher education.

Bernard Bailyn on the Craft and Art of Historical Writing

Bernard Bailyn on the Craft and Art of Historical Writing

Understanding and Learning to Do Teacher Education in an Introductory Methods Course

ABSTRACT The development of a teacher educator requires a sustained, systematic, and critical inquiry into one’s own practice. The purpose of this study was to explore how two doctoral students, in their first semester of doctoral study, understood how to do physical education teacher education in an introductory teaching method class, through the lens of socialization theory. This was a collaborative self-study using an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Three themes were identified. First, social justice and its sub-themes: (a) challenges in changing habited behaviors, (b) social justice issues embedded in the class material, and (c) understanding diversity, change, and the importance of adaptability. Second, practice-based teacher education and its two sub-themes: (a) alignment between theory and practice, and (b) core teaching practices. Third, adapting to the COVID-19 environment and sub-themes of: (a) environmental constraints, (b) improving while being online, and (c) creating a supportive and caring atmosphere in the breakout sessions. Our recommendations include using self-study as a tool to help doctoral students understand and do teacher education.

Developing Preservice Teachers’ Adaptive Competence Using Repeated Rehearsals, Opportunities to Reflect, and Lesson Plan Modifications

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine how preservice teachers (PSTs) developed their adaptive competence in lesson planning through repeated rehearsals and reflections in an online learning environment. Methods: A case study design utilizing descriptive analysis was used to analyze data collected from a series of lesson plan iterations made by nine PSTs in a physical education teacher education program. All participants attended one online introductory methods course, which consisted of a synchronous lecture and laboratory components to learn fundamental instruction and management skills in teaching physical education. Findings: PSTs made positive adaptations in five core practices in their lesson plan iterations. However, the frequency of adaptations in each core practice varied in different lesson components. The findings suggest that the complexity of content being taught and opportunities embedded in each lesson component may influence how adaptations were made in lesson plans. Conclusions: Repeated rehearsals and reflections can facilitate PSTs’ development of adaptations in lesson planning in an online environment. However, learning environments may prevent PSTs from adapting certain core practices.

How the cases you choose affect the answers you get, revisited

Abstract External validity is a major challenge for experimental research. I offer a new perspective on this challenge, drawing on work on case studies and causal inference – the sort of material regularly covered in introductory methods courses in political science – to reflect on the use of experiments in the study of global development and poverty alleviation. I argue that single experiments in this area are often essentially single case studies. They can offer important insights, but generalizing from them suffers from the same (well-established) problems of generalizing from all single case studies – especially in the absence of theoretically-informed attention to the selection of experimental sites. One way experimentalists have sought to improve external validity is through replication. I suggest a more promising approach is to combine experiments with case study and comparative methods to link selection of experimental “cases” to theory.

Improving Student Success in the Capstone Seminar: The Importance of a Prior Research Intensive Experience

Most undergraduate social science programs require the completion of a capstone experience before graduation. Despite the recognized potential of capstone courses to deepen learning, many students do not perform well. The present study examines several factors that may prepare students for academic success in a fairly typical capstone course for undergraduate political science majors. We hypothesize that students who earn high grades in research intensive courses will also earn high grades in the capstone course, even after controlling for other factors related to academic performance. Our results show that successfully completing research intensive training in just one course, even above and beyond the introductory methods course, improves capstone performance. We conclude with a discussion of how our findings lend further support to arguments in favor of “scaffolding” political science curricula to funnel students from less to more intensive research experiences as they move toward the completion of their degrees.

Preparing Preservice Teachers in a Virtual Space: A Case Study of a Literacy Methods Course

This article describes a case study of an online literacy methods course offered at a small, midwestern university. Formal and informal instruments were used to assess students' backgrounds, interests, and dispositions. Archival course data were analyzed to examine interactions among content, course design, and student characteristics. Despite variations in self-directedness, dispositions toward the content, and prior experience with online/hybrid learning, 19 of 20 students who originally enrolled in the course were able to complete a compacted, fully online version of this introductory methods course. However, course evaluations indicated that for approximately one fourth of the students, there was a perceived mismatch between course objectives and online delivery. Findings suggest the need for design experiments that address immediacy in online courses and grapple with the issue of whether or not methods courses can be successfully delivered in a fully online format.

Developing students' qualitative muscles in an introductory methods course.

The exponential growth of qualitative research (QR) has coincided with methodological innovations, the proliferation of qualitative textbooks and journals, and the greater availability of qualitative methods courses. In spite of these advances, the pedagogy for teaching qualitative methods has received little attention. This paper provides a philosophical foundation for teaching QR with active learning strategies and shows how active learning is fully integrated into a one-semester course. The course initiates students into qualitative dispositions and skills as students develop study aims and procedures; enter the field to gather data; analyze the full set of student-generated data; and write results in a final report. Conducting a study in one semester is challenging but has proven feasible and disabuses students of the view that QR is simple, unscientific, or non-rigorous. Student reflections on course assignments are integrated into the paper. The strengths and limitations of this pedagogical approach are also described.

Triangulating Debates Within the Field: Teaching International Relations Research Methodology

Undergraduate introductory methods courses offer a unique opportunity to bring methodological pluralism to the field by teaching students multiple approaches to research. This article presents one way to organize an introductory undergraduate research methods course. By focusing on central debates between methodological approaches on issues of causality, context, and essentialism, an instructor can introduce positivism, interpretivism, and relationalism as distinct, coherent methodological approaches to research. Depicting these three debates and three approaches graphically on a triangle can illuminate some core methodological debates within the field today. It also illuminates the methodological underpinnings of many of the discipline's theoretical debates.

Interpretation and inference: towards an understanding of methods

Last week I was chatting to a colleague about an introductory methods course we were working on. We were talking about the unit on ‘‘The Research Question, and how this differs between qualitative and quantitative research. He then made an offhand remark along the lines of, But then, the qualitative––quantitative debate is over anyway. Everyone is doing mixed methods research.’’ I was greatly relieved to find that this debate, which has rumbled on since I was a student, is finally resolved. But since I wasn’t really sure how mixed methods had won the final round, I asked him, somewhat naively, just what mixed methods were. He explained that this was when you did a survey after your qualitative study to get some check marks on Likert scales so you could do statistics on it and get a p-value. When I tried to explain to him that conducting a survey was only one of the most basic methods of quantitative research, and indeed, many quantitative researchers do not accept the findings of most surveys, he simply did not understand. This reminded me of the last iteration of ‘‘mixed methods’’ I heard where you designed your survey questionnaire, then conducted a ‘‘focus group’’ in which you handed out your questionnaire and asked people what they thought of it. It will surprise no one that the first version was advocated by a person who is primarily a qualitative researcher, and the second by someone who bears allegiance to quantitative research. The first trivializes quantitative research; the second trivializes qualitative. My colleague went on to propose that all educational researchers should be well versed in both methods so they can move easily from one to the other. That seems to me equivalent to demanding that all undergraduates should be competent in quantum mechanics and theology. It would be nice if each should be sufficiently familiar with the assumptions, epistemologies and methods of the other to be an appreciative observer, but each discipline is sufficiently complex and multi-faceted to claim full time attention of anyone working toward achieving competence. Indeed, even within quantitative methods, there are many highly specialized subgroups––psychometrics, cognition, personality, and so on. The same, I suspect, holds true, in qualitative; I presume battles rage between ethnomethodologists, grounded theorists, and Foucauldians, just as they do between

Teaching Against the Text: The Case of Qualitative Methods

Although all of us must teach against the text at times, I find myself doing this most often when teaching about qualitative methods in the context of a general introductory methods course. Myths about the nature and practice of qualitative research are both embedded in the folklore of mainstream sociology and supported by the textbooks that we use in our classrooms. However, many students resist instructors' attempts to question textbooks, which they regard as “gospel truth”. How can we get our students to go beyond both textbook myths and mainstream folklore to grapple with misleading and inaccurate statements? In this article I suggest several strategies to raise awareness of myths about qualitative research, explain why several common statements about qualitative methods are myths, and suggest classroom strategies for engaging students in challenging these myths. I end with an evaluation of my own efforts to teach against the text in an undergraduate methods class.

NASCAR Winston Cup Race Results for 1975–2003

Stock car racing has seen tremendous growth in popularity in recent years. We introduce two datasets containing results from all Winston Cup races between 1975 and 2003, inclusive. Students can use any number of statistical methods and applications of basic probability on the data to answer a wide range of practical questions. Instructors and students can define many types of events and obtain their corresponding empirical probabilities, as well as gain a hands-on computer-based understanding of conditional probabilities and probability distributions. They can model the rapid growth of the sport based on total payouts by year in real and adjusted dollars, applying linear and exponential growth models that are being taught at earlier stages in introductory statistics courses. Methods of making head-to-head comparisons among pairs of drivers are demonstrated based on their start and finish order, applying a simple to apply categorical method based on matched pairs that students can easily understand, but may not be exposed to in traditional introductory methods courses. Spearman's and Kendall's rank correlation measures are applied to each race to describe the association between starting and finishing positions among drivers, which students can clearly understand are ordinal, as opposed to interval scale outcomes. A wide variety of other potential analyses may also be conducted and are briefly described. The dataset nascard.dat.txt is at the driver/race level and contains variables including: driver name, start and finish positions, car make, laps completed, and prize winnings. The dataset nascarr.dat.txt is at the race level and contains variables including: number of drivers, total prize money, monthly consumer price index, track length, laps completed, numbers of caution flags and lead changes, completion time, and spatial coordinates of the track. These datasets offer students and instructors many opportunities to explore diverse statistical applications.

An Evaluation of Web Conferencing in Online Teacher Preparation

More and more colleges and universities are utilizing web-based instruction to meet the educational needs of teachers seeking certification in special education, and effective course design strategies for using this technology are needed. In this article we present results form a survey of 54 teachers who evaluated 6 design considerations for using web conferencing in an on-line introductory methods course in the area of emotional/behavioral disorders. The design considerations were class and team size, learning activities, instructor's role, feedback from classmates and instructors, building a sense of community, and technical support. We found that web conferencing was perceived as a very effective delivery format for offering coursework and other professional development experiences to mid-career changers and teachers on limited licenses.

Gifts from Social Research

I have regularly taught research methods courses at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. A little over 10 years ago it struck me that we had learned a good deal about measurement techniques in social research which we could apply directly to teaching, specifically to the evaluation and grading of students' achievement (see Hedley 1978). In order to provide a more accurate (and therefore more defensible) assessment of our students, it is necessary to employ a variety of measures on repeated occasions. In other words, variation and repetition in testing are the keys to valid measurement in teaching, as they are in research (see Blalock 1982). Ever since I laid out these thoughts formally (see Table 1), I have taken great pains to implement these two main strategies of reliable measurement. For example, 13week introductory methods course includes four in-class tests (composed of multiplechoice, short-answer, problem, and essay questions), two short assignments, and one term project. Although this approach involves more work on part, I now feel confident when I hand in grade sheets. This outcome alone is worth the extra effort. During the past few years, upon handing out course outlines to students in the methods course, I have explained in full detail the rationale underlying system of evaluation. In other words, I demonstrate to them at the outset how the techniques of social research can be applied to solve a practical problem. This is not a dry introduction to a course that is often perceived as boring or as a necessary hurdle to earning the degree; it is a discourse about something in which they are all intensely interested-grades. The fact that strategies borrowed from social research can be used to produce a fair final grade distribution instills within students a newfound respect for the principles and techniques they are about to learn. When giving out the course outline, I confront the students with my problem: How can I, at the end of the course, produce an accurate ssessment of their knowledge of the course content? What are possible alternative explan tions for the final grades that I come up with? This latter question evokes from them a wide v riety of rival hypotheses, many of which are listed in Table 1. For example, invariably they mention test anxiety as one partial explanation fo the grades they receive; also included are unfair ests (i.e., inadequate measurement of the material they are supposed to master) and various kinds of instructor bias (e.g., favoritism and initial marks determining subsequent test scores). In their answers and in the ensuing discussion, the students are learning how to concepualize a problem-that is, the first stage in the research process. In fact, during this demonstration of how the methods of social research can be used to solve an important practical problem, I introduce them to all the steps involved in conducting research. Thus the demonstration also serves as an overview of the entire course.

Does the reading methods course make a difference?

Abstract Students enrolled in an introductory methods course responded to an inventory of tasks in the teaching of reading at the beginning and again at the conclusion of the course, selecting tasks deemed most and least important in elementary reading instruction. Chi Square and correlational analyses revealed significant changes in students' perceptions of task importance from beginning to end of the course. Changes revealed a heightened concern for individualized assessment and instruction, skill development and motivation for reading.

“Hands-On” Problem-Solving in Introductory Political Science

Political science and the other social sciences have had their behavioral revolution,1 but the news of this revolution has not reached most of the undergraduates en tering the first social science methods course. Many stu dents major in a social science or take social science courses because they want to learn about real world problems. Many pre-law students also take a social science major. In overwhelming numbers social science students either fear quantitative methods, or they feel that a quanti tative methodology can contribute little to their under standing of real world problems or to their career in law. Colleagues I have spoken with, both in and out of the social science disciplines, generally agree with the above assessment. The introductory methods course can open up a whole new approach to real-world problem solving and provide students with valuable insights applicable to analysis beyond social science. Oftentimes, however, the introductory methods course becomes an exercise in mem orization for the student. Basic terminology, alternative research designs and approaches, and introductory statis tics are gone over in a textbook or a series of readings. Students read about a particular method or methods and how they have been applied, and are tested on what they remember and presumably have learned. Should the time come when students have to do an empirically biased paper, it is expected that they would be able to use the knowl edge of what others did and apply it to the paper at hand. The purpose of this report is to communicate to social scientists and others how a hands-on problem-solving approach can be used in an introductory methods course. This particular course, as reported by student and col league observation, helps overcome student fears of quant itative methods and does impress upon students the utility

Microteaching in an introductory methods course

(1978). Microteaching in an introductory methods course. The Teacher Educator: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 28-31.