Course syllabus

Aims: This problem-based module aims to equip teacher candidates with the skills to use appropriate methods in the execution of their Master of Teaching research exercise.

Module Content:

• Qualitative approaches to research in education including interpretive, naturalistic, phenomenological, interactionist and ethnographic approaches; data collection including fieldwork strategies involving observations and the recording of naturally occurring interactions, interviews, and the collection of documents and artefacts.
• Qualitative data analysis including the processes of coding and interpreting data.
• Issues of validity and reliability and the use of procedures such as triangulation and audit trails.
• Descriptive statistics: analysis involving continuous and discrete variables.
• Correlations such as Pearson product-moment, Cronbach Alpha, Spearman rank-order correlation coefficients.
• Hypothesis testing involving Null, significance level, degrees of freedom, one- and twotailed tests, level of confidence, sample statistic, population parameter, Type 1 and Type 2 errors, power of an experiment will be set for students.
• Commonly-used sampling distributions in quantitative  research in education, giving rise to the use of z-scores, t-tests, and chi-square tests.