Research narrative
Assessment task link to unit learning outcomes:
This task is designed to align with the following intended learning outcomes, to ensure that students will be able to articulate and demonstrate they:
- Understand purposes, principles and approaches in educational research
- Appreciate the importance of educational inquiry for improving professional practice related to teaching and learning, including their own.
Research narrative
Details of task:
The Research Narrative is an essay that conveys background and key ingredients to your research project to date on this unit.
Completing the narrative helps you establish a focus for your literature review and provides a first step in building your research project on an area of interest to teaching and learning, to be completed in EDF4101. Feedback on your research narrative from peers and tutors should help sharpen and develop your focus for your literature review and research project.
The research narrative involves you in thinking through what you are learning when developing a topic for enquiry in light of a brief scan of the literature. It will demonstrate your familiarity with and appreciation of themes covered in Chapters 1-5 of Kervin et al., alongside aspects covered in Chapters 6, 7 and 10.
You are expected to demonstrate that you have begun to delve into the complexity of your problem for small-scale teacher research independently, and have considered how other professional researchers investigate such topics through a close and careful examination of a few carefully selected studies from the literature.
Completing this well requires you to show curiosity and reflexivity, identifying and synthesizing some complex information and different points of view, and applying this to your own emerging ideas for a research focus. You also need to be able to discuss what you have/have not learned from the reviewed sources, and related to this, be able to plan next steps for the second assignment in the unit, the literature review. This is because you may find you need a new focus to develop for a research question or project, either from reviewing the literature, or following feedback on your submission, e.g. because the topic isn’t as original, critical or compelling as initially thought.
Our recommended way of completing the task:
OPENING
A good narrative is one that draws readers into a “story” using a compelling presentation of a problem/issue. With this in mind, you might want to start your research narrative by presenting a problem/issue in teaching and/or learning that you can argue needs researching, be mindful of the points raised in Kervin et al. on this. This problem/issue should be important (not trivial), and have a strong connection to developing your specialization in teaching. It might be derived from personal interest and experience, or reading secondary sources, your wider studies at Monash University, or contemporary debates about education. Thus in the opening, you should be able to crystallize a worthwhile focus for further inquiry, and a key research question or the questions you will attempt to find some answers to throughout your assignment. (Typical words – 300 – consider the length of a good abstract, and the introduction and background to a research article for the tone and style)
MIDDLE
To explore and illustrate your research topic using scholarly sources, you should identify three research articles that (i) relate to your topic, and (ii) show different approaches to researching this area of interest. In your submission, briefly document how you established the topic area for your initial search of the literature, how and where you found the articles and their key features, and the key reasons for selecting these from other possible examples (e.g. 100 words). After this, for one research article, discuss the adequacy and substance of its research questions in relation to the problem the researcher or research team is trying to solve or illuminate.
Ensure you discuss the main features of the study design, the data collected and the findings too (e.g. 500 words). Next, briefly but carefully compare aspects of this article to two other research articles researching the same area of interest (e.g. 300 words). These other studies may be linked to the first study you’ve selected in some way (e.g. a follow-up study by the authors or colleagues working in this area), or findings or implications. Think carefully about how best to represent any similarities and differences between the studies, and the questions, issues or challenges they raise for further studies, given the themes of this unit.
END
The final section of many research articles is a conclusion or implications section. So we recommend you identify and evaluate the key advantages/disadvantages of using any similar approaches for a small scale study of your own, i.e. showing you understand the implications, and you can demonstrate key aspects of critical reading and writing of educational research. For example, highlight and discuss any practice and ethical issues you would need to consider further for conducting such a study, and identify themes for further review of the literature (substantive, methodological, practical, ethical, etc.). You might expect the reader of your work to see that you can round off your narrative with a personal and professional reflection clearly articulating the value and contribution of pursuing a small scale study on your identified area of interest (for example, in relation to professional standards, and/or established problems of practice well known in your specialization area) – e.g. 400 words
NB references, visualizations (including tables, diagrams, charts etc.), and any appendices are not included in the word count for this assignment.
Word count/equivalent: 1600 words
Weighting/Value: 40%
Presentation requirements: Essay format, pdf file uploaded to Moodle
We encourage the use of a clear title, an introduction and conclusion, subheadings, first person voice, citations that support arguments, a strong structure and tight argumentation that demonstrates your thinking and reading in relation to the unit themes and intended outcomes
Criteria for marking
- A topic area of interest, aim and research questions (5 marks max)
- Why this research interests you and is worth pursuing (5 marks max)
- Key details and discussion of three research articles (15 marks max)
- Implications of possible research approaches for a small scale study (advantages/disadvantages including practical and ethical issues) (10 marks max)
- Academic literacy (5 marks max)
