Intro to Research (1.0)

Timestamps

00:01 - 00:40 Introduction
00:40 - 01:42 Accessing the Relay Library
01:42 - 02:33 Information Literacy for the Data Narrative
02:33 - 03:20 Developing Your Research Question
03:20 - 06:00 Scholarship as a Conversation (Incorporating research into your data narrative)
06:00 - 07:16 What sources should I use?
07:16 - 13:04 Searching Tips: filter, Iterate, References
13:04 - 16:01 Evaluating Sources
16:01 - 18:11 Integrating Research into your Data Narrative
18:11 - 19:38 Formatting APA Citations

Your Data Narrative and Master’s Defense asks you to choose a research question to investigate. How do you know what questions to ask? When considering your research quesion, you can use some of the following questions and considerations to choose a potential research topic.

• Look at your data – what stands out?
• Do you find yourself discussing certain groups of students with your team at school?
• Does your school have a special program that might have an impact on your data?
• Do you have a new instructional strategy that you want to try?

Most importantly, make sure you choose a topic that you find genuinely interesting! There's nothing worse than having to spend all of this time and effort researching a topic that you find boring or confusing.

Once you've chosen a topic, it's time to formulate your reseach question! When writing your research question, you should make sure that it is:

• Clear. Your audience should be able to understand your question without needing to ask additional clarifying questions.
• Focused. You should be able to comprehensively answer your research question within the space provided by the writing task.
• Concise. Your question should be at most a sentence or two. If you find your question is a paragraph long, you may want to focus or clarify your question a little more.
• Complex. Your question should require synthesis and analysis of research and data to thoroughly answer - it shouldn't be a simple "yes" or "no" question.
• Arguable. The potential answers should be open to debate, rather than already accepted facts.

COVID has naturally had a huge impact on education, and many graduate students have expressed interest in finding research on the effects of COVID and education. Due to both the recency of the pandemic and the nature of the peer-review process, there's still not a lot of proven scholarly research available on COVID and education. As of mid-2021, you may be able to find reports; commentary; or case studies on individual classrooms, schools, or maybe school districts; but there hasn't been much time to do a broader, overarching study or to come to many definitive, research-supported conclusions. TL;DR, it can be a little tricky to find scholarly research on the effects of COVID and education.

That being said, here are a few tips and tricks to finding articles and resources that can support your research question!

• The single quickest way to narrow down your search is to set your filters to exclude anything published before 2020. Anything published before 2020 is too early and will not have any mention of COVID. 
  • That being said, keep an eye on the date of publication - something published in March 2021 has significantly more data and information to draw on than something published in March 2020.
• You may have to be willing to expand your search and look at related topics. For example, there's already a lot of research that's been done on the effects of online/virtual learning, even if it's not specifically addressing COVID. If you're looking more at the effects of emergency or disaster situations on education, you might consider looking at the research done on similar scenarios such as other medical crises, natural disasters, or displacement. Although the situations are not exactly the same, there may be similar patterns or findings that you could draw on to support your own conclusions.
• While you're searching, you'll want to carefully evaluate your resource - is it a scholarly article? Is it a case study (and if so, was it looking at multiple classrooms or schools, or just a single classroom)? Is it a commentary or opinion piece speculating about the future of education? Is it a data report? Different sources have different information to contribute, but remember that for your data narrative, you'll want to focus on scholarly, evidence-based research.

Additional Resources

Graff and Birkenstein wrote a book called They Say, I Say, in which they give practical tips and templates for making your stance within the scholarly conversation clear.

"They Say"

When you use sources, you should generally start by referring to what the authors you have read in your research said ("They Say"). There are a couple of ways to do this:

• Direct Quote: you quote the material word-for-word and use “quotation marks” around the text. 
  • According to [author], "____."
• Paraphrasing and Summarizing: you rephrase or restate ideas or concepts in your own words
  • [Author] argues that ____.

Regardless of which of these you choose, you should be sure to cite your sources so that your readers know who "they" are.

"I Say"

After stating the positions of others, you then include your own perspective on what they have said ("I say"). You may agree, disagree, or agree with some portions and disagree with others.  You may also compare/contrast your own experience and context with the experience and context of the authors, or provide other reactions. Here are some sentence stems you may use when introducing your own perspectives:

• Agreeing:
  • "I agree that ____ because ______."
  • "[Author] stated _______. This matches my experience of ___________."
• Disagreeing:
  • "[Author]'s claim that _____ rests on the questionable assumption that _____."
  • "[Author] does not consider _______."
• Both Agreeing and Disagreeing:
  • "Although I agree with [Author] that _____, I cannot accept their overriding assumption that ________."
  • "While [Author's] argument that _____ is strong, it fails to consider __________." 
  • "While [Author] convincingly argues____, that does not apply to this context because____."
• Introducing an Ongoing Debate:
  • "For a long time, scholars like [Author A] have argued _________. However, scholars such as [Author B] have recently published new research that makes a compelling argument that_______."
  • "In recent discussions of ____, a controversial issue has been whether _____. On the one hand, some argue that_____. On the other hand, others argue that____. My own view is______."
• Other Reactions:
  • "I was surprised to find that ___________, because ______________."

You can view some of Graff and Birkenstein's templates here.

Effective teachers identify the needs of their students, read research and theory on how to meet that need, and then use the research to inform their instructional decisions. 

One specific way that you may be asked to integrate research as a teacher is to defend an instructional strategy.  When you use research in this way, you must clearly connect the research to the strategy. Do not merely name-drop or describe a concept without making an explicit and well-developed connection between the theory/research and your instruction and your knowledge of your students. 

Be sure that you:

• Name or describe the instructional move
• Describe exactly how you used that instructional strategy in your classroom
• Explain how research/theory supports your instructional move. Paraphrase or quote the research, and describe why it is relevant.

The following sentence stems may be helpful as you justify your instructional decision making with research:

• Research by [author] suggests [paraphrase or quote the conclusions of the author]. With this in mind, I [describe how you used the strategy in your classroom]. 
• The decision to [describe the strategy] was informed by [paraphrase or quote the research].
• [Author] says [paraphrase or quote the conclusions of the author]. This influenced how I [describe how you used the strategy in your classroom]. 

Example 1:

Strategy: Visual Anchor

Research: Echevarria , J., Vogt , M.E. & Short , D. (2010 ). Making Content Comprehensible for Secondary English Learners: The SIOP^®  Model. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Example: “One way I will support student learning of this initial goal is through visual anchors in the classroom. I created a chart for the classroom naming each device as we learn it with its definition and an example, called our Writer’s Toolbox. …. Research shows visual aids are a helpful tool for ELL scholars and can be beneficial for all students in reviewing and retaining new information (Echevarria, Vogt & Short 2010).”

Example 2:

Strategy: Connect Learning to Real World Situations

Research: Gay, G. (2010). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, & Practice (2nd Edition). New York: Teachers College Press

Example: “My students are also very motivated by examples relevant to their lives. As Geneva Gay states in Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, & Practice, culturally responsive teaching ‘builds bridges of meaningfulness between… academic abstractions and lived sociocultural realities' (2010).  Many examples throughout the learning segment are real world situations these students encounter. For example, in the first question…”

Non-Example:

Strategy: POW + TREE

Research: Harris, K. R., Graham, S., & Mason, L. H. (2003). "Self-regulated strategy development in the classroom: Part of a balanced approach to writing instruction for students with disabilities." Focus on Exceptional Children, 35(7), 1-16

Non-Example: I decided to implement the POW + TREE strategy during instruction.  The student will be given visuals with the use of kiniesthetic movements to help her internalize the components of a persuasive essay  (Harris, K. R., Graham, S., & Mason, L. H., 2003).

Why this is a non-example: While the author includes a citation, the research by Harris, Graham, & Mason was not paraphrased or quoted, and it is unclear how the research supports the strategy chosen.