SSE MA Seminar 10/1/2003

When we come to advising with Kelly bring info on what we plan to take this year and where we want to go. Her office hours are Wednesdays 10-12, Thursday 2-4.

Important to meet with your advisor as often as you can and get recommendations – Kelly will make sure you

Nov. 13 id deadline for program proposal and have to have Laura's signature and advisor's signature.

Leena Her lnaher@stanford.edu

Children's Programming ESC

3 interns to run projects – paid through community work-study program.

Start October 13

Villa Oaks elementary (across street) 20-30 kids

Help them with their homework, work with homeless families

Mural arts, community garden in the spring

Proper mindset for research

Wisdom – what defines wisdom? Who is wise? What attributes does a wise person have?

• Lauren – has limitations and knows them
• Experience
• Critical of their own ideas/self-reflective
• Adam – insight
• Nara – moral/ethical
• Descartes: I Think Therefore I Am
• Wittgenstein: There's thinking going on
• The Adams: statements like that need context, get blown out of proportion (original really?)
• Laura: There's feeling and thinking going on. America's repression of emotion distorts the importance of thought.
• Robert Fulton: Feelings are the organizing force that help us organize our data and help us shape and ___as we__
• Can't be a good researcher if you don't have a balance between thought and what you're feeling

Common communication problems

• Words have different meanings for different people
• Real meanings are masked/concealed
• "Beat around the bush"
• Out of touch with their feelings – being able to work with your feelings constructively means they won't block you
• Writing A Woman's Life Carolyn Hilburn
• I think perhaps I can avoid paying for a shrink if we are going to talk about feelings this much in class.

Venn diagram: Reasonable Mind and Emotional Mind – the intersection is the "Wise Mind"

Foundations for Mindfulness:

• Non judging
• Non striving
• Patience
• Acceptance
• Trust

Beginner's Mind

• Accepting
• Open
• In the moment
• Creative
• That's it, now I don't have to go to church either. This is all very spiritual.

Community for doing research

Foundations of Community

• Civility
• Nurtures Newcomers
• Trust
• Attentive
• Supports risk-taking
• Appreciates Diversity
• Listens

Foundations of Writing Groups

· Agree to disagree

· Respect beginner's mind

· Respect both thoughts and feelings

· Respond non-defensively

· Accept being misunderstood

· Listens to partially formed ideas

The Craft of Research

Why Do Research anyway

November – start to break out into groups based on common interests.

Writing groups are more peer review/criticism – we will not be working on group projects

The Benefits of Research

· Writers are better readers

· New way of seeing: patterns v. events

· Written word is clearer than thought

· Testing your ideas against community standards

· Remembering

Clyde Cluckholm, "The fish would be the last creature to discover water" – we don't recognize our behavior patterns while we are doing them.

Community membership:

• Thinking from the point of view of readers
• Going beyond fact collecting
• Sharing standards for seeing
• Sharing standards for data collecting

Community Values reflected in paper:

• Literature – not happening in a vacuum, we are informed of antecedent work
• Methodology – commitment to truth because there is a possibility of replication
• Natural seeing is unreliable and biased – acknowledge, don't supress
• Many perspectives are better than one – HOWEVER the majority is not necessarily correct

What makes it research?

Verification

Replication

Refutation

What makes a research discipline? (How does anthro differ from econ differ from psych differ from soc?)

How questions are formulated

How they define a domain

How they organize content conceptually

Principles of discovery and verification

Ernest – lingo, jargon

Laura example: Anthropologists don't do a lot of quant

Q: What is a field of inquiry?

What makes it educational research?

• Locus of interests
• Share phenomena, events, institutions, problems, peoples, processes
• Rarely violate the principles of disciplines

This means….

CONTROVERSY!!! (Now I am channeling an 80's new-wave song)

Lacks consensus about:

Grounds for making claims (con-tro-ver-sy)

The methodology debate – quant v. qual

Quant:

• Independent reality
• Operationalized, Measureable Data
• Surveys of Populations
• Stat Analysis
• Creates generalizations

Qual:

• Interpretive, transitory reality
• Narrative, ethnographic data
• Case studies
• Analytical induction – look for themes and patterns that might apply to other situations.
• Committed to alternatives to the status quo

The other debate: Positivist v. Constructivist

Positivists: / Empiricism

• World separate from interpretations – objective knowledge is possible
• Search for unbiased representations

Constructivist

• Social reality constructed by participants
• Social reality is determined by local reality
• Different people, different worlds

Criticisms of Positivism/Empiricism

• Wrongly apply the methods of the social sciences to humans
• Leads to deterministic view of humans
• Concentrates on social order, does not explain social change
• Search for objectivity misplaced
• Radical in the early days, conservative now

Laura - Ability to generalize is not a negative thing, people do it all the time, empiricism is not totally misguided.

Criticisms of Constructivism

• Unempirical
• Unreliable results
• Biased by interpreter

This brings up two different issues with writing:

Empiricism/Quant: "Rhetoric of objectivity"

Constructivism/Qual: "Reflexive turn" (Include personal experiences and reactions to what goes on.)

Quant and Qual look at individual differently

Quant looks at individual:

• Social environment constant
• Lots of repetition over time
• Represetnative samples and populations

Qual:

• Meaning embedded in local contexts
• Generalization difficult; done on a case-by-case basis

Results

Quant:

• Quantify results
• Criticized for examining trivial social facts (cant quant "wisdom")
• Influential

Qual:

• Verbal
• Words matter
• Capture themes/patterns

Used together:

Qual discovers themes and relationships at the case level

• Discovery role
• Generation of insights

Quant validates qual themes and relationships in samples and populations

• Confirmatory role
• Testing of hypothesis

To use together have to have stable social environment

Concepts in qual must be replicable as measurable variables

Problems with using together:

Can't have it both ways, either objective or subjective, either observer or observed, reality is either constant or created

Analytic Induction:

The process of searching the data, bit by bit, for the purpose of inferring that certain events or statements are instances of the same underlying theme and pattern

Deduction:

Identifying themes and patterns prior to data collection and then searching through the data for instances of them.

Limitations of Educational Research

• Limited generalizations
• Value-laden
• Assumes a stable reality
• 0.1% of the federal budget spent on schools is spent on research
• Relatively little impact on schools

Gage - "If educators were to suddenly lose the body of knowledge gained from educational research…schools would continue to operate pretty much as they do now."

• Adam 1 disagrees, points out charter schools are frequently using existing research – greater flexibility, autonomy from bureaucracy, can enact or change policies more easily than other public schools.
• Adam 2: Costs to implement research
• Lindsay? - The conflict between the new GOOD idea and the trendy – implementation can be rocky or fizzle out in three years and teachers are tired of it
• Nara – how to market research to policy makers, what numbers they listen to, how to advocate change.
• CA teaching standards supposedly based on research, class size reduction – but a lot of the research gets mistaken for a one-size-fits-all solution and apply to inappropriate populations
• Adam 1 – there are no "natural laws" or "universal laws" that apply universally in education as there are in the hard sciences

Your Research?

What does all this have to do with us

Lee S Shulman "We are advised to focus first on our problem and its characteristics before we rush to select the appropriate method."

How to Choose a Research Method

Problem

Values

This is your time to write about something that really matters to you. Write about your topic

Scholarly topic

• Original
• 40-60 pages
• Three types:
• Secondary Source Review
• Empirical Study (quant/qual)
• Analytical (Philosophical or Historical)

Methodology combinations (Quant and Philosophical) happen in the conceptual framework.

The parts of a scholarly paper

1. General topic intro
2. Problem statement
3. Research question
4. Conceptual framework
5. Research methodology/paper format
6. Literature review
7. Findings
8. Conclusions
9. Implications for future research

Erin: What writing style do most journals use? APA, Chicago Manual, etc. Laura: check the individual journals.

Erin: What should we use for this project?

Laura: Not particularly a stickler as long as consistent and thorough, but she'll find out.

Always writing

• Select topic and write about it
• Refine thesis and write about it
• Write outline
• Collect references
• Read and take notes
• Collect data and write about it
• Refine argument and write it up
• When all is done, revise it!

Writing Tip: When reading, set 20-30 minutes aside at the end to write about your reactions to what you just read.

Reading tip: "Be amiably skeptical of most of the research you read, to question it, even as you realize how thoroughly you depend on it"