Course Details

EDP 800 Overview

This advanced course in research methods builds on students’ prior knowledge of quantitative and qualitative research, and focuses on the philosophical foundations of those methods and how they manifest in current research practice. Students will utilize these foundations to examine a variety of important issues that need to be considered in designing research. As the first course in the Ph.D. sequence, this course serves as a transition for doctoral students to prepare them to design and conduct their own research in the Ph.D. track such that their work is positioned to contribute to the current body of research. The course takes students through the Ph.D. proposal writing process, examining the concepts of introductions, purpose statements, argumentations, and research design/analysis. This course is designed to prepare doctoral students for the transition into doctoral research. As such it builds on previous research and statistics courses. The focus of this course will be on the design and understanding of research through achievement of the following primary learning objectives: 1. Understand and demonstrate original inquiry and analysis, grounded in current knowledge and research that leads to generalizability or transferability; 2. Understand and demonstrate that extensive and thorough literature review, analyzing the literature and synthesizing the theoretical foundations and current research; 3. Understand and demonstrate that the literature review includes appropriate primary sources and preponderance of research studies; 4. Understand and demonstrate that rigorous design procedures for research including explicit, comprehensive efforts to address internal and external validity, or verification, i.e., must address causality. Prerequisite: ED 740.