Posts Tagged ‘mixed method research’

Writing Plainly

New study says scholarly articles that are hard to read don’t actually make the author sound smarter, and they get cited less. Authors hope their findings will encourage graduate programs to teach students how to write clearly.

The study also offers academics a tutorial and a new bot-driven Clarity Calculator to help improve one’s writing.

“I believe that in public universities, which are funded with taxpayer dollars, the public should be informed in lay language about research and results that are relevant to the public.”

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more on academic writing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=academic+writing

suggestions for academic writing

these are suggestions from Google Groups with doctoral cohorts 6, 7, 8, 9 from the Ed leadership program

How to find a book from InterLibrary Loan: find book ILL

Citing someone else’s citation?:

http://library.northampton.ac.uk/liberation/ref/adv_harvard_else.php

http://guides.is.uwa.edu.au/c.php?g=380288&p=3109460
use them sparingly:
http://www.apastyle.org/learn/faqs/cite-another-source.aspx
Please take a look at “Paraphrasing sources: in
http://www.roanestate.edu/owl/usingsources_mla.html
it gives you a good idea why will distance you from a possibility of plagiarizing.
n example of resolution by this peer-reviewed journal article
https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i5.2566
Ungerer, L. M. (2016). Digital Curation as a Core Competency in Current Learning and Literacy: A Higher Education Perspective. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning17(5). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i5.2566
Dunaway (2011) suggests that learning landscapes in a digital age are networked, social, and technological. Since people commonly create and share information by collecting, filtering, and customizing digital content, educators should provide students opportunities to master these skills (Mills, 2013). In enhancing critical thinking, we have to investigate pedagogical models that consider students’ digital realities (Mihailidis & Cohen, 2013). November (as cited in Sharma & Deschaine, 2016), however warns that although the Web fulfils a pivotal role in societal media, students often are not guided on how to critically deal with the information that they access on the Web. Sharma and Deschaine (2016) further point out the potential for personalizing teaching and incorporating authentic material when educators themselves digitally curate resources by means of Web 2.0 tools.
p. 24. Communities of practice. Lave and Wenger’s (as cited in Weller, 2011) concept of situated learning and Wenger’s (as cited in Weller, 2011) idea of communities of practice highlight the importance of apprenticeship and the social role in learning.
criteria to publish a paper

Originality: Does the paper contain new and significant information adequate to justify publication?

Relationship to Literature: Does the paper demonstrate an adequate understanding of the relevant literature in the field and cite an appropriate range of literature sources? Is any significant work ignored?

Methodology: Is the paper’s argument built on an appropriate base of theory, concepts, or other ideas? Has the research or equivalent intellectual work on which the paper is based been well designed? Are the methods employed appropriate?

Results: Are results presented clearly and analyzed appropriately? Do the conclusions adequately tie together the other elements of the paper?

Implications for research, practice and/or society: Does the paper identify clearly any implications for research, practice and/or society? Does the paper bridge the gap between theory and practice? How can the research be used in practice (economic and commercial impact), in teaching, to influence public policy, in research (contributing to the body of knowledge)? What is the impact upon society (influencing public attitudes, affecting quality of life)? Are these implications consistent with the findings and conclusions of the paper?

Quality of Communication: Does the paper clearly express its case, measured against the technical language of the field and the expected knowledge of the journal’s readership? Has attention been paid to the clarity of expression and readability, such as sentence structure, jargon use, acronyms, etc.

mixed method research

http://login.libproxy.stcloudstate.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3deric%26AN%3dEJ971947%26site%3dehost-live%26scope%3dsite

Stanton, K. V., & Liew, C. L. (2011). Open Access Theses in Institutional Repositories: An Exploratory Study of the Perceptions of Doctoral Students. Information Research: An International Electronic Journal16(4),

We examine doctoral students’ awareness of and attitudes to open access forms of publication. Levels of awareness of open access and the concept of institutional repositories, publishing behaviour and perceptions of benefits and risks of open access publishing were explored. Method: Qualitative and quantitative data were collected through interviews with eight doctoral students enrolled in a range of disciplines in a New Zealand university and a self-completion Web survey of 251 students. Analysis: Interview data were analysed thematically, then evaluated against a theoretical framework. The interview data were then used to inform the design of the survey tool. Survey responses were analysed as a single set, then by disciple using SurveyMonkey’s online toolkit and Excel. Results: While awareness of open access and repository archiving is still low, the majority of interview and survey respondents were found to be supportive of the concept of open access. The perceived benefits of enhanced exposure and potential for sharing outweigh the perceived risks. The majority of respondents were supportive of an existing mandatory thesis submission policy. Conclusions: Low levels of awareness of the university repository remains an issue, and could be addressed by further investigating the effectiveness of different communication channels for promotion.

PLEASE NOTE:

the researchers use the qualitative approach: by interviewing participants and analyzing their responses thematically, they build the survey.
Then then administer the survey (the quantitative approach)

How do you intend to use a mixed method? Please share

paraphrasing quotes

https://youtu.be/MiL4H09v0gU

statement of the problem

Problem statement – Wikipedia

 
Metaphors: A Problem Statement is like… 
metaphor — a novel or poetic linguistic expression where one or more words for a concept are used outside normal conventional meaning to express a similar concept. Aristotle l 
The DNA of the research l A snapshot of the research l The foundation of the research l The Heart of the research l A “taste” of the research l A blueprint for the study
 
 
 
Here is a good exercise for your writing of the problem statement:
Chapter 3
several documents, which can be helpful in two different ways:
– check your structure and methodology
– borrow verbiage
http://education.nova.edu/Resources/uploads/app/35/files/arc_doc/writing_chpt3_quantitative_research_methods.pdf 
http://education.nova.edu/Resources/uploads/app/35/files/arc_doc/writing_chpt3_qualitative_research_methods.pdf
http://www.trinitydc.edu/sps/files/2010/09/APA-6-BGS-Quantitative-Research-Paper-August-2014.pdf

digital object identifier, or DOI

digital object identifier (DOI) is a unique alphanumeric string assigned by a registration agency (the International DOI Foundation) to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet. The publisher assigns a DOI when your article is published and made available electronically.

Why do we need it?

2010 Changes to APA for Electronic Materials Digital object identifier (DOI). DOI available. If a DOI is available you no longer include a URL. Example: Author, A. A. (date). Title of article. Title of Journal, volume(number), page numbers. doi: xx.xxxxxxx

http://www.stcloudstate.edu/writeplace/_files/documents/working-with-sources/apa-electronic-material-citations.pdf

Mendeley (vs Zotero and/or RefWorks)

https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/11355/226845?utm_campaign=Mendeley%20Webinars%202&utm_campaignPK=271205324&utm_term=OP28019&utm_content=271205712&utm_source=99&BID=799935188&utm_medium=email&SIS_ID=46360

Online Writing Tools: FourOnlineToolsforwriting

social media and altmetrics

Accodring to Sugimoto et al (2016), the Use of social media platforms for by researchers is high — ranging from 75 to 80% in large -scale surveys (Rowlands et al., 2011; Tenopir et al., 2013; Van Eperen & Marincola, 2011) .
There is one more reason, and, as much as you want to dwell on the fact that you are practitioners and research is not the most important part of your job, to a great degree, you may be judged also by the scientific output of your office and/or institution.
In that sense, both social media and altimetrics might suddenly become extremely important to understand and apply.
Shortly altmetrics (alternative metrics) measure the impact your scientific output has on the community. Your teachers and you present, publish and create work, which might not be presented and published, but may be widely reflected through, e.g. social media, and thus, having impact on the community.
How such impact is measured, if measured at all, can greatly influence the money flow to your institution
For more information:
For EVEN MORE information, read the entire article:
Sugimoto, C. R., Work, S., Larivière, V., & Haustein, S. (2016). Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: a review of the literature. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08112
related information:
In the comments section on this blog entry,
I left notes to
Thelwall, M., & Wilson, P. (2016). Mendeley readership altmetrics for medical articles: An analysis of 45 fields. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67(8), 1962–1972. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23501
Todd Tetzlaff is using Mendeley and he might be the only one to benefit … 🙂
Here is some food for thought from the article above:
Doctoral students and junior researchers are the largest reader group in Mendeley ( Haustein & Larivière, 2014; Jeng et al., 2015; Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2014a) .
Studies have also provided evidence of high rate s of blogging among certain subpopulations: for example, approximately one -third of German university staff (Pscheida et al., 2013) and one fifth of UK doctoral students use blogs (Carpenter et al., 2012) .
Social data sharing platforms provide an infrastructure to share various types of scholarly objects —including datasets, software code, figures, presentation slides and videos —and for users to interact with these objects (e.g., comment on, favorite, like , and reuse ). Platforms such as Figshare and SlideShare disseminate scholars’ various types of research outputs such as datasets, figures, infographics, documents, videos, posters , or presentation slides (Enis, 2013) and displays views, likes, and shares by other users (Mas -Bleda et al., 2014) .
Frequently mentioned social platforms in scholarly communication research include research -specific tools such as Mendeley, Zotero, CiteULike, BibSonomy, and Connotea (now defunct) as well as general tools such as Delicious and Digg (Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott, 2005; Hull, Pettifer, & Kell, 2008; Priem & Hemminger, 2010; Reher & Haustein, 2010) .
qualitative research
“The focus group interviews were analysed based on the principles of interpretative phenomenology”
 
1. What are  interpretative phenomenology?
Here is an excellent article in ResarchGate:
 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263767248_A_practical_guide_to_using_Interpretative_Phenomenological_Analysis_in_qualitative_research_psychology
 
and a discussion from the psychologists regarding the weaknesses when using IPA (Interpretative phenomenological analysis)

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-24/edition-10/methods-interpretative-phenomenological-analysis

2. What is Constant Comparative Method?

http://www.qualres.org/HomeCons-3824.html

Nvivo shareware

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/01/11/nvivo-shareware/

Qualitative and Quantitative research in lame terms
podcast:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-scientific-method-works/id278981407?i=1000331586170&mt=2
if you are not podcast fans, I understand. The link above is a pain in the behind to make work, if you are not familiar with using podcast.
Here is an easier way to find it:
1. open your cell phone and go find the podcast icon, which is pre-installed, but you might have not ever used it [yet].
2. In the app, use the search option and type “stuff you should know”
3. the podcast will pop up. scroll and find “How the scientific method works,” and/or search for it if you can.
Once you can play it on the phone, you have to find time to listen to it.
I listen to podcast when i have to do unpleasant chores such as: 1. walking to work 2. washing the dishes 3. flying long hours (very rarely). 4. Driving in the car.
There are bunch of other situations, when you may be strapped and instead of filling disgruntled and stressed, you can deliver the mental [junk] food for your brain.
Earbuds help me: 1. forget the unpleasant task, 2. Utilize time 3. Learn cool stuff
Here are podcasts, I am subscribed for, besides “stuff you should know”:
TED Radio Hour
TED Talks Education
NPR Fresh Air
BBC History
and bunch others, which, if i don’t go a listen for an year, i go and erase and if i peruse through the top chart and something picks my interest, I try.
If I did not manage to convince to podcast, totally fine; do not feel obligated.
However, this podcast, you can listen to on your computer, if you don’t want to download on your phone.
It is one hour show by two geeks, who are trying to make funny (and they do) a dry matter such as quantitative vs qualitative, which you want to internalize:
1. Sometimes at minute 12, they talk about inductive versus deductive to introduce you to qualitative versus quantitative. It is good to listen to their musings, since your dissertation is going through inductive and deductive process, and understanding it, can help you control better your dissertation writing. 
2. Scientific method. Hypothesis etc (around min 17).
While this is not a Ph.D., but Ed.D. and we do not delve into the philosophy of science and dissertation etc. the more you know about this process, the better control you have over your dissertation. 
3. Methods and how you prove (Chapter 3) is discussed around min 35
4. dependent and independent variables and how do you do your research in general (min ~45)
Shortly, listen and please do share your thoughts below. You do not have to be kind to this source offering. Actually, be as critical as possible, so you can help me decide, if I should offer it to the next cohort and thank you in advance for your feedback.