many moons ago, a colleague and i put together a course called "critiquing educational research' ... which sounds in part, something like what robert has been circling around now, the purpose of the course was to be better able to look at research that is in one's discipline ... and look at it with a somewhat more critical eye grad students were in the course (that helped because all were going to have to do some research!) and, though i don't think it is enough, there was a single prerequisite of having at least ONE full (not in the canadian sense) course in statistics ... more would be nice but, a minimum of 1 the first thing students had to do was to bring US in 3 articles from THEIR disciplines (all published in journals that they looked at on a rather regular basis) ... and we then selected one for that student to use later ... (we did this as a review so we could control and not have say ... 10 3 group experiments, tried to have a mix of kinds of studies, and also not to have papers with such complex design/analysis methods that it would be impossible to discuss them in the class) the course was divided up into 3 main blocks ... not necessarily = length 1. my colleague and i, presented some overview materials on design, notions of internal and external validity, reviewed a bit about measurement issues, and things like this 2. the second part is where my colleague and myself shared in presenting a critiquing model ... ie, how to go about it ... and we modelled that by doing two studies that WE found 3. the last part focused on student presentations ... usually about 2 per night ... where the student gave a small summary (and a short handout to give to each class member) critique of what their study was, what was done in it, what was found, + and - features ... now, for each of the #3 presentations ... we had developed a rating scale that we used as a class ... where a scale of 1 to 10 was implemented ... with 10 being superb ... !!! down to 1 which meant that the journal should be contacted and FORCED to retroactively locate and destroy every copy of that paper that was published!! (we thought it was THAT bad!) overall, we liked what happened in the course ... and we think students benefited however, even with the control we exerted on the paper selection, there were examples where the type of analysis used in the study was way beyond what we had demanded as prerequisite statistical skill and had no way to discuss satisfactorily in the course in addition, we found that in some cases, lack of some measurement skill on the part of students kept us from pursuing in any detail ... problems in some papers related to advanced measurement matters of course, my colleague and i were NOT content experts in all the disciplines represented by papers used by the students ... and what might be good noise variables to control for in one discipline and study, may have NO relevance whatsoever in another area and there were a variety of other problems within the confines of this course while we "think" that the course helped students, the fact that there was not some higher level of common methodological skill across students, ON ENTRY INTO THE COURSE, greatly limited how far and WHAT we could go and, this is what i see as a basic fundamental problem one has to face IF one would want to develop a "robert like" course where emphasis is on reading papers ... and understanding them ... with no prior skill development i also find this same problem to carry over to what i call intro research methods courses ... that want to cover the territory in one course ... when there are essentially no prerequisite skills attached to entry ... _________________________________________________________ dennis roberts, educational psychology, penn state university 208 cedar, AC 8148632401, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://roberts.ed.psu.edu/users/droberts/drober~1.htm ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ =================================================================
