Category: Academic Research Blogs
-
Learning R for quantitative analysis
As I’ve discussed before, I learned to use the R programming language (using RStudio IDE) to conduct the quantitative analysis for my EdD degree. In this post, I’ll outline how I learned what I learned, and what I used that knowledge for. All the code I wrote is viewable in the GitHub notebook found here.…
-
Where am I in my EdD journey?
I know it’s been a while since I wrote about my doctoral journey. In this post I’ll summarise where I’m at so far… Previous posts on this can be found here. Data collection & analysis I completed my data collection in the summer of 2023. This included four focus groups, six psychometric testing questionnaires (three…
-
Students’ views on competence and other factors affecting motivation
In this blog, I will briefly outline what students said about competence in relation to target grades and other factors. Please note that student names have been changed for anonymity. Target grades don’t match perceived competence At several points through the focus group, students identified that there was a disparity between their target grades and…
-
Autonomy, time-management and homework-setting
Following coding data from focus groups according to the three main aspects of self-determination theory (as well as a few other common factors that have arisen through reading the transcript), I have started sub-coding data too. The first sub-code (under the ‘autonomy’ main code) relates to time-management and homework-setting, and I’ll outline how students from…
-
Data collection round 1 – psychometric testing for motivation types
It’s finally started! On Thursday 22nd September 2022 I started the data collection phase for my main doctoral study. Since then, I have conducted a focus group (which will take far longer to analyse in any useful detail), but in this post I’ll outline some of the headline findings from the first of three psychometric…
-
Lessons from Pilot 2
In a previous post, I wrote about what I learned from running a pilot study for my EdD, before the main study starts in September 2022. In a nutshell: it went terribly, and that was the best outcome I could’ve hoped for. You can read about this in a post I wrote about the first…
-
Student motivation study: pilot number 1
In this post I’m going to outline the process I’ve been through to run a pilot of my research. This includes why I’m doing it in the first place, what I planned to do, what I did, and how it went. Purpose of the pilot Since my Master’s research consisted solely of questionnaire data, I…
-
Ethics update: approval!
In my last post about this, I had just submitted my ethics application. In this post I’ll talk about the feedback I received, and how I have addressed those issues. Administrative points Some of the information that was required for the ethics proposal was missing. Rookie. This meant that I’d forgotten to put in some…
-
The ethics process so far
I have just filled out the application for ethical approval for my research, and am waiting for the results from the committee. I’ve found that writing about the aims of the research, including what I want to get out of it wasn’t too difficult. I used the proposal as a chance to work out where…
-
What is self-determination theory, and how might it help me in the classroom?
Sometimes I’m reminded (either through Twitter, day-to-day conversation, or another way) that a fair few teachers don’t see much (any) value in the use of educational research. Whilst it is true that a lot of it is very contextual, I don’t agree that it can’t be helpful. What is unhelpful is educational research that is…
odeneal.blog 