Quick and Easy Research Projects

In December, I asked for your feedback via a survey. One of the comments in it requested information about the types of research projects that are the quickest and easiest to produce. The short answer to that is that projects requiring no new data collection (i.e., those which collect data through secondary use approval) will be the least time-consuming to produce. Here’s my rationale for this response and some ways to begin.

	With a secondary use of data project, you have already collected the information you need, so you won’t need to request volunteers to participate (which sometimes takes a long time). Additionally, in many cases, you won’t need to ask for permission with a consent form to use it. For example, in many cases, it would be more harmful to participants to be contacted by you to request they consent to you using their grades in your class (or impossible to do so if they have graduated and are no longer Durham College students). Finally, the REB application form for secondary use is much shorter and less time-consuming to complete, so that part of the project is also less time-consuming.

         Now for some project ideas. Think back to any semester where you have changed something in your course. Perhaps you have included a new activity to review for tests. Or perhaps you flipped your classroom. Or you might have been scheduled in a very nice classroom for a change and wonder if that influenced students’ grades. Or if you keep a seating chart, perhaps you have a hypothesis related to students’ chosen seat in the class affecting performance in some way. In each of these cases, you didn’t intend to collect students’ performance for the purpose of research (you collected this information in order to assess learning and assign a grade), but you can use these data to test a hypothesis. 

	So that’s where I would start for an “easy”, and less time-consuming research project. I hope this post has given you some food for thought! As always, if you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see from me, please reach out to me via email (lynne.kennette(at)durhamcollege.ca) or on MS Teams, or pop in during my weekly “office hours” on whereby(dot)com(slash)drlynne (every Friday from 12:30-1:30). 

Comments

Research Q&A

*Can college professors publish document analyses or book reviews similar to how university professors do? Absolutely! There is no degree requirement for any publications (scholarly articles or book reviews). It’s all about the content! So if you’ve read the book and would like to write up a review, you can absolutely send it to a journal. *What does student-generated research look like? How might faculty encourage student-generated research? Are faculty allowed to cowrite articles with students and publish them? What does a faculty/student collaboration look like where both parties receive credit for the work? It can take many forms- one of the challenges is we only have our students for 1 semester (GAS/PHS), but if you have a keen student interested in research in the first year of a 3-yar program, it’s totally possible. How do you encourage it? You could offer bonus points for students who write a really good research question or include course-based research as part of ...

Tips for planning your research dissemination

The next couple of topics will relate to publishing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) articles (though it will also apply to most other forms of research publishing). So, I thought I would give some brief info about publishing research articles in general. Here are some things to consider for disseminating research. The publishing process actually begins well before the project itself, especially if you have any co-authors (if you’re doing everything yourself and have nobody else in your research team, then you can skip this paragraph). Determining authorship order and who will contribute in which way (and how much each will contribute) to the writing is an important step. Why does the order of the authors matter? In most fields, the author in the first position is the one who made the most substantial contribution to the project (though not necessarily to the writing, but often that is also the case). Additionally, the first author won’t get truncated when being cite...

New website!!! (I've moved to www.drlynnekennette.ca)

All of my new posts can be found on www.drlynnekennette.ca These will remain her for historical purpose, but no new posts will be added.

Research Coordinator Blog

Search This Blog