T.
V. GounkoIn early August, while preparing for a graduate seminar called “Research Methods: Leadership,” I looked at the class enrolment list. The class was full; fifteen graduate students, most pursuing a Master of Education degree signed up for the course. Those who enrol in this class are expected to learn about educational research and then develop and complete either an independent research project, a Master of Arts thesis or a doctoral dissertation. As our department has a large group of international students, I was not surprised to discover that most of my students were English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. When I started teaching the class in September, I also found out that only 3 students were native English speakers. The majority of the students had Mandarin Chinese as their first language. The rest included a francophone student, as well as students from the United Arab Emirates, Turkmenistan, Rwanda, and Pakistan. This was a truly international class which, in my opinion, can provide a rich learning experience and present significant challenges in the English speaking academic environment.
In graduate programs, students are expected to be independent in their academic work and take more responsibility in decision making. While generally, graduate programs are more flexible compared to undergraduate programs, they also have higher scholarly expectations (Gounko, forthcoming). Graduate students need to write well and fluently in their discipline in order to communicate results of their research. Over the past several years, researchers and university instructors have focused on graduate writing in part due to the growing diversity of the student body. When instructors and supervisors discuss the ‘writing problem’ (Haggis, 2006) they often refer to international, ESL learners. Higher education internationalization brought many international graduate students to Canadian campuses. These students have to work not only on improving their language skills but also to learn about and participate in a new academic culture.
From my personal experience as a graduate ESL student and university faculty, I recognize that the ‘writing problem’ is not solely an ESL students’ problem. English speaking students experience difficulties with academic writing as they also try to understand the implicit requirements and unspoken rules of graduate work while acquiring new knowledge. According to Haggis (2006), a lack of ability to write and succeed has less to do with intelligence, and, I will add, with the language skills, and more to do with lack of experience with the assumptions and practices of university discourses. Researchers (e.g. Saltmarsh & Saltmarsh, 2008) argue that ‘fixing the problem’ is a complicated task involving an institutional shift from skill-based solutions such as thesis writing workshops to “sustained, disciplinary-embedded writing pedagogies that allow graduate students to negotiate academic literacies over time” (Badenhorst, Moloney, Rosales, Dyer, & Ru, 2015, p. 2). If we want to facilitate student learning, we need to promote an academic literacy approach to writing which is understood as the social practice rooted in social worldview and embedded in discursive practices. This means that in order to become successful academic writers students need to acquire literacy practices of academia (Badenhorst et al., 2015).
While designing the course syllabus, I had to consider the diverse make-up of my graduate class. I was asking myself a question: What specific task(s) will help students learn about academic writing? I decided to reconfigure my assessment to promote students’ learning and to address the difficulties encountered by my previous students. In this paper, I report on the assessment strategy that proved to be very effective for all students regardless of their native language. Students’ comments included in this paper come from their personal reflections incorporated in a written component of a formative course assessment. In designing this assessment I sought to devise a learning task that would address the long-term learning needs of the graduate students and assist them in writing their master’s projects, thesis, and dissertations.
Promoting academic literacy and scholarly writing
The “Research Methods: Leadership” course was delivered twice a week over eight weeks and included three types of assessment: a Research Article Analysis, a Mini Research Proposal, and a Full Research Proposal. Students received regular homework to reinforce key learning points and to practice academic writing at home and to share it in class. The course content centered on research methodologies, methods, rigor, academic discourses, rhetorical moves, and style. The core text used for this course was Creswell’s Research Design (Fourth Edition). In addition, students were given articles and book chapters on conducting research and writing research papers. All in-class, on-line Course Space materials and assessment were designed to make the course experience relevant to students’ own research projects. In this paper, I want to discuss a Research Article Analysis because of students’ responses to this assignment. They found this task particularly helpful in linking the course material and class discussions: many describing it as “really getting it.”
A Research Article Analysis was used as a formative assessment task during the graduate Research Methods course. The task required that students prepare a three to five page analysis of an empirical research article of their choice and present their short summary in class. I provided students with the detailed assignment guidelines with a table of key features of academic publications to be incorporated in the analysis, including the following categories:
Researcher’s stated objectives
Researcher’s worldview (as per Creswell, 2014)
Methodological approach
Theoretical perspective
Research methods used
Limitations of research (stated or not)
As part of the assignment, I asked students to reflect on whether the authors achieved the stated objectives, effectively used a methodological approach to answer research questions and how they analyzed the data. The last set of questions to which students had to respond included their personal assessment of their learning while working on this assignment.
As the course progressed and students started presenting their Analyses in class, I noticed a considerable change in the way they responded to the course content. They seemed to be excited about being able to analyze scholarly research and identify specific aspects of research previously discussed during the seminars. Based on the students’ comments in relation to the impact of this approach to assessment, I can conclude that most students were inspired by their own scholarly development. These are some of the original comments that demonstrate students’ deep learning and excitement at discovering how this assignment contributed to their academic literacy.
I found this article very organized and a good example of academic writing. In terms of my learning, I certainly learned about the importance of clear and concise headings, sub-headings, and overall structure of an article. These authors took a very direct approach to stating important topics such as their purpose statement and theoretical framework. Creswell (2013) uses the same approach, encouraging simple, direct communication of a writer’s ideas. My deepest learning is to use the same approach in my thesis, using clear, concise language to write my auto-ethnography.
This article is a model that could be used in a research methods class. After reading and studying this article, I have a much better sense of succinct writing and the importance of a well-planned methods section and a clear presentation of the study’s findings.
My learning through this assignment is more of an acquiring knowledge process instead of an updating existing knowledge. I appreciate the opportunity of assessing the research article, I am educated by not only the research methods, but also the content information that I am able to apply for my own project.
Doing this article research provides me a chance to really think about and reflect upon what I have learnt from class and the text book. … The theoretical terminologies such as ontology and epistemology are more clear and visual when I connect the research article with the class content.
Generally, I find this article analysis process to be really inspirational. I find myself more comfortable with the research design terminologies and more clear about my own research design. I really enjoyed this learning and ruminating process.
The project has taken me from Paul Ramsden’s (2003) surface to deep learning because I have had to apply my understanding of the terms required under the assignment. Without the project, I would not have learned, as you do when you genuinely engage, and would not have ultimately questioned Scott & Scott (2016) to realise their study has clear shortcomings. This process can therefore be repeated with another article and seems invaluable in becoming more critically competent in evaluating the research of others.
Several students explicitly pointed out that after working on this assignment they gained confidence in both evaluating research of other scholars and commencing their own research.
This assignment has given me the confidence to analyze articles in a more meaningful way, look for flaws, and recognize strengths that I can build on in my own research.
I can say that I am a bit more confident in identifying paradigms and how they inform methodology and methods of a research. The article helped me to see a good example of how various elements of research inform each other and come together to form a good informative piece that can be further developed or applied to another case.
My understanding of research is permanently altered. The assignment, the readings I have undertaken and the classes are already invaluable in introducing me to structures and frameworks that will help me order my conceptual chaos.
Overall value of the assignment for me was to see clearly differences between purpose and research question, ontology and epistemology, literature review and data analysis. In addition, this article clearly demonstrates fat-trimming in action, because a reader can identify that the research has been revised well. I hope to be able to discriminate between them in my project as well.
Besides learning about the research methodologies and how to design a research proposal and conduct research, students participated in various activities including group reading, discussions, presentations, writing and evaluative assignments. Through these activities students were able to closely examine how academics present their research focusing on writing techniques, discourses and structures. The Research Article Analysis helped students connect the different aspects of the research process including epistemology, ontology, methodology and data collection methods. By doing the Analysis, students were able to observe the academic discourse in practice. They noticed specific components of academic writing such as objectives, methodological and theoretical orientation of research, as well as various techniques and stylistic devices (metaphors, vignettes, author’s voice) used in the articles.
As a course instructor and supervisor I see clear benefits of this assignment. First, the Analysis establishes a practice of reading and understanding academic research while identifying and articulating the specific aspects of research, and connecting them to class discussions and activities. Second, it encourages students to think about and practice scholarly writing, which is critical specifically for international students who may be not familiar with academic discourses and practices of Canadian universities.
By observing students, their growth and excitement about learning during this course, I also realized how important it is to continue my own professional development. My interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) encourages me to learn more about supervising graduate student writing, academic literacies, and the role of a supervisor in student scholarly development.
