Purpose

This course was developed in order help you get the most out of your doctoral experience. There are three main objectives that drive this course:

Introduce you to our expectations regarding doctoral study with a particular emphasis on Foundations of Education. Such expectations include:

· A commitment to exploring and developing theory

· A commitment to conducting research

· A commitment to sharing knowledge with the larger scholarly community through publications, presentation, or other endeavors.

Introduce you to a variety of Foundations of Education faculty members and familiarize you with faculty research programs.

Provide you with an integrated, conceptually deep introduction to some of the major concepts and issues in Educational Psychology (EDP), Theory and Social Foundations (TSOC), and Research and Measurement (RESM).

Format

The format of this course is unique. There is one lead instructor (Dr. Pugh) who will attend all sessions and be responsible for all student assignments. In addition, another Foundations of Education faculty member, who has expertise related to the week's topic, will be present to help lead a discussion and present his or her own research program. This format will give you the opportunity to hear from an expert, get to know the Foundations of Education faculty, and learn about the research going on in the department.

Overall, each class session will focus on developing a deep and integrated understanding of a few ideas. The course will give you a sample of the important ideas in the field. In the context of these ideas, we will also focus on what it means to do research. We will address such things as:

What is a theoretical framework?
What is a research question?
What is a methodology?
What is an assertion and what constitutes evidence?

In addition, we will spend about 30 minutes each class period discussing a side topic that is of practical relevance to doctoral students such as "How to get involved in research projects and interest groups."

Materials

Course pack: Available at The Student Book Store (3059 W Bancroft).

Electronic reserve: http://www.cl.utoledo.edu/find/reserves.html. These pdf files will download almost instantly on campus. If you have a dial-up connection, they may take a long time.

Assignments

Email Discussions

Each week you will share you thoughts/questions/insights about the reading assignments with a partner via email in the following way. One student will send his or her thoughts/questions/insights about the reading assignments for the week to his or her partner. Then, the partner will respond to the comments and add some of his or her own. The next week you will reverse the order of who sends the first message. We will change partners every two weeks. Each time you send a message, Cc it to me: kevin.pugh@utoledo.edu.

The purpose of these discussions is to help you exchange ideas and develop a set of issues and questions to discuss in class. The discussions will not be graded. You will simply get credit for doing them.

Article Critique

One of the best ways to learn about writing research papers is to critique research articles. Some students struggle with their dissertation because they have not acquired the foundational skills of writing research papers. A dissertation is a terrible place to learn these skills because the magnitude of the project is too overwhelming. Hence, in this course we will focus on analyzing a number of research articles by asking such questions as "what is the theoretical framework?" and "what is the research question?" To further help you learn to critique research articles, you will be given an article and asked to critique it. This will be a take home assignment and you may collaborate with other students. In fact, I highly encourage you to collaborate with other students. Your critique should do the following:

Describe the theoretical framework of this article. That is, describe the overall argument for the study, its connection to the existing literature, and the need for or purpose of the study.
Identify the research question(s)
Describe the methodology of the study.
Evaluate whether the methodology is appropriate:

Does it fit with the theoretical framework and allow the researchers to answer their research question(s)
Are there flaws in the methodology?

Evaluate the discussion:

What assertions/claims do the authors make? Are these supported by the data?
What are possible limitations to the study? Are these addressed by the authors?

Discuss the generalizability of the results.

Final Project

For the final project, you will have the choice of writing a critical literature review or a research proposal. These two options are described below. As part of this project, you will also do a presentation at the end of class. These presentations will be done in the format of a scholarly conference. You will have about 15 minutes to do your presentation. Afterwards, a discussant will have about 5 minutes to make comments. Each student will have the opportunity to be both a presenter and a discussant. More details will be given in class.

Critical literature review. A critical literature review is an analysis (not just a summary) of the research and theories associated with a particular topic. This means you need to make an argument as you review the literature (i.e., develop a theoretical framework). You may argue that there is an important gap in the literature, that the literature is primarily associated with one theoretical perspective and could benefit from some other perspective, that you are providing an important synthesis of different bodies of literature, that a particular theory, conclusion, or hypothesis can be derived from the existing literature, and so on. The important thing is that you do make some argument instead of just summarizing the literature.

Research proposal. This project involves writing an extensive proposal for a future research study. In this proposal, you should include the following:

· Critical literature review. You should review the related literature in such a way that it makes an argument for the importance of or need for your project. This literature review should be on a smaller scale than if you were just doing a critical literature review for the course project.

· Research question(s). You should clearly state your research questions and provide an operational definition. The argument made in your critical literature review should naturally lead to a research question. For example, you may argue that a critical problem in science education is that the students don't apply what they learn about science. You may further argue that many researchers have addressed this problem, but no one has specifically looked at whether some students fail to apply the science ideas they learn because they aren't interested in those science ideas. This argument naturally leads to some research questions: Do student fail to apply the science ideas they are not interested in? Are students more likely to apply the ideas they are interested in? Are interested students more likely to apply their science knowledge than non-interested students? Your study should have one clearly stated research question. A version of this question should involve an operational definition. In other words, it should specify how constructs such as "interest" and "apply" are to be measured. For instance, the last research question stated above could be written as such: Are students who score above 8 on the interest survey more likely to apply the concept of evolution in their everyday lives by talking with other people about the idea than students who score below 4 on the interest survey?

· Methods section. Here you should state the methods you propose to use. Be sure to provide a rationale for these methods. Also, be sure to describe how you will analyze your data.

Grade Break Down

Email Discussions	20%
Article Critique	30%
Final Project	50%

Readings in Course Pack

EDP/TSOC 8190 Sec. 2

Dr. Pugh

Feinberg, W. (1995). The discourse of philosophy of education. In W. Kohli (Ed.), Critical conversations in philosophy of education (pp. 24-33). New York: Routledge.
Greene, M. (1995). What counts as philosophy of education? In W. Kohli (Ed.), Critical conversations in philosophy of education (pp. 3-23). New York: Routledge.
Snauwaert, D. T. (2001). Cosmopolitan democracy and democratic education. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 4(1), 1-8.
Greeno, J. G., Collins, A., & Resnick, L. B. (1996). Cognition and learning. In D. C. Berliner, & R. C. Calfee (Eds.), Handbook of educational psychology (pp. 15-46). New York: Macmillan.
McCloskey, M. (1983). Naive theories of motion. In D. Gentner, & A. L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental models (pp. 299-324). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Dunn, T. G., & Shriner. (1999). Deliberate practice in teaching: What teachers do for self-improvement. Teaching and Teacher Education, 15, 631-51.

7. Hughes, S. A. (2003). An early gap in black-white mathematics achievement: Holding school and home accountable in an affluent city school district. The Urban Review, 35, 297-322.

8. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 465-92.

Airasian, P. W., & Walsh, M. E. (1997). Constructivist cautions. Phi Delta Kappan, 78, 444-49.
Pugh, K. J. (2002). Teaching for transformative experiences in science: An investigation of the effectiveness of two instructional elements. Teachers College Record, 104, 1101-37.
Bond, T. G., & Fox, C. M. (2001). Applying the rasch model: Fundamental measurement in the human sciences. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Chapter 1.
Hokanson, B., & Hooper, S. (2000). Computers as cognitive media: Examing the potential of computers in education. Computers in Human Behavior, 16, 537-52.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1994). Computer support for knowledge-building communities. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(3), 265-83.