The Master's Project

The focus of the Master's Project is reflection and research into a topic of particular interest to the student. The educational community within the School of Education and Social Policy believes that professional practice must be guided by inquiry and reflection so as to yield understanding and action that promote positive educational change. We believe that committed educators should value and incorporate systematic inquiry and reflection into their practice using these skills to help them act as agents of change within their professional community. Within the MSEd program, therefore, we believe that it is important to prepare candidates to engage in educational research with the idea that they will, as professionals, be practitioner-researchers and educational leaders. Reflection and inquiry are embedded throughout the program, but are perhaps most evident in the Master's Project.

The Master's Project is an opportunity to pursue resolution of a question about which you have genuine concern and interest. It may grow out of an interest that you have had for some time, or one that has arisen more recently through course work or personal experience. As you identify and pursue resolution of your question, you will learn a great deal about your topic and about yourself. During this process you will learn about and use tools for inquiry and self-reflection, which will be useful throughout your career. The master's project is a major undertaking and is usually completed across the span of a year. This document describes the master's project process as it unfolds throughout an academic year. A summary outline of the process is also provided.

Identify Your Question: Read! Talk! Explore!
You begin this process by working to understand your own interests and concerns. This will lead you to identify a tentative research question, usually embedded within a larger domain or topic area. The next step is connecting your questions and interests to the existing thinking that has been done about the topic. This is done by exploring the literature and other resources as well as by talking to others (e.g., fellow students, instructors, field mentors, domain experts) about your questions and interests. Use all media and facilities available to pursue your investigation: everything from books, films, Internet resources, to interviews and field visits! As you explore, you will begin to articulate and then refine your research question.

Begin Informal Data Collection
As soon as you identify a tentative question, we would encourage you to begin at least informally collecting data related to your topic. This might be done by deliberately observing field settings that are relevant to your research interests and taking careful field notes. You might also interview relevant persons (e.g., mentors, experts) and write up notes from the interviews. If your question relates to your work or field setting, you might find it very useful to keep a dated journal in which you regularly reflect upon your field experiences and observations in relation to your research domain. Collecting and cataloging artifacts (e.g., student work, meeting minutes, other written or pictorial items) that relate to your questions can also be very helpful. Careful notes from this "pilot" stage of exploration will be very useful later as you begin more formal data collection and analysis.

Develop a Preliminary Master's Project Plan
If you are planning to take the master's project courses and complete your project during this academic year, you will turn in a preliminary project plan to the MSEd office by the end of the fall quarter. The preliminary project plan will include the following (in order):

1. The question your project aims to address.
   
   
2. Description of the background of the question: the concerns, experiences and background knowledge that led to your initial interest in the question. You should explain the importance of the question to your own professional development and practice and its relevance to others in the field.
   
   
3. An annotated bibliography of resources you have used or intend to use as you pursue resolution of your question. The bibliography should include a formal citation for each text/resource, which will serve as the base for your growing project bibliography. You should also include a short set of notes on each of the resources that you have explored to date. These notes should first describe
   
   
   • the relation of the resource to your master's project question
   • relevant connections to any of the other texts/resources
   • ideas and questions the text/resource has raised for your project
     
     
   The notes will represent the beginning of your project literature review and will also be helpful later as you begin to interpret your ideas and data in light of existing research. You will add to and revise the bibliography as your project progresses.
   
   
4. A description ( two pages) of ideas you have about methods you might use to pursue resolution of your question.
   

1. A copy of a text to be used for class discussion in MS_ED 407, Research and Analysis in Teaching and Learning II: Literature Review and Research Methodology. The text copy you subit should be clear and clean enough to be duplicated for a course packet. The copy should also include a full bibliography citation for the text. The citation shold be typed across the top of the title or first page of the text. This might be a research article, a book chapter or another text that describes issues central to your master's project question (suggested length: 5-12 journal article pages). The text should be "discussible." A discussible text is generally less concerned with providing factual information than with exploring the complexities and issues related to the topic or domain. The text should have enough interpretive ambiguity to allow you to develop a cluster of questions* about its meaning and to generate important interpretive questions among other class members. Such a text offers rich possibilities for discussion and, through discussion, for clarification of questions and ideas that you and your colleagues have about the topic.
   
   
2. A one-page description of the text and its relevance to your master's project.
   
   
3.  A preliminary cluster of questions about the text.* * See handout "The Nature of Questions."
   

Participate in a Peer Research Team
We will assign you to a peer research team by the start of the winter quarter. This group will stay together throughout the year. Research team members read each other's proposals and project drafts, work together in MS_ED 407, Research and Analysis in Teaching and Learning II: Literature Review and Research Methodology and Interpretation and MS_ED 408, Research and Analysis in Teaching and Learning III: Analysis Interpretation and Dissemination, and generally provide each other with feedback, encouragement and support. We have found that teams can be a tremendous help as people work on their projects.

Take MS_ED 407, Research and Analysis in Teaching and Learning II: Literature Review and Research Methodology
When you enter the MS_ED 407 Literature Review and Research Methodology and Interpretation class, you will have an opportunity to discuss your topic domain in some depth through the discussion of a text on the topic that you will pick out (see "text proposal" above). You will prepare questions on the text, then work with a facilitator to prepare for and then lead a class discussion on the text. This exercise represents a real opportunity to think through central issues in your topic domain and often results in a leap of understanding. You will write a reflection on the interpretive discussion that you lead, relating what you learned to your master's project. You will also complete a draft of your project literature review during this period. In this piece you will take your accumulated annotated bibliography notes and use them to review and analyze the literature you have identified and read relevant to your project topic. In this review you will note important research findings, determine connections among research studies, and explore the ways in which they inform and relate to your topic area. You will continue to add to and refine this review as you work through the later stages of the project. In 407 you will also learn about different research paradigms and ethical issues in research. You will learn about different methods of data collection and use some of these methods to collect additional data for your project. Toward the end of this class you will complete and turn in a data collection plan and research ethics statement.

Continue to Collect Data & Read
Throughout the time you are taking 406 and 407, you will be collecting data and continuing to develop your background knowledge of the topic area.

Take MS_ED 408, Research and Analysis in Teaching and Learning III: Analysis Interpretation and Dissemination
Reflecting Upon Educational Problems is the capstone course for the MSEd Program. During the first half of 408 you will learn about data analysis methods and will use these methods to analyze your own data. You will also go back to the literature you have read and examine the meaningful connections it has to your analysis as you begin to develop a full interpretation of your data. Hopefully, as you interpret your data, a resolution to your central question will begin to emerge. You will complete a draft of your full study, and it will be reviewed by your peers and by your instructor. You will also complete a poster version of your study to be presented in a special poster session.

Poster: The poster will incorporate 1) the research question, 2) ethics statement, 3) literature informing your study, 4) data collected/results, 5) preliminary analysis, 6) data interpretation and 7) new questions emerging from your study. During the second half of 407, we will explore more deeply the uses of and dissemination of practitioner research. You will formally present your study to your peers and to other interested friends (e.g., mentors, faculty) whom you may invite.

Complete Your Project!
Finally, at the end of the 408 course, you will submit your final master's project! The final project components include (in order):

Title of the Project

Question Presentation and Domain Statement. This includes a statement of the specific question you pursued as well as a description of the larger topic area or domain from which your question comes. You will explain in this section why the question is important to you, why it should be important to others and how the question fits within the larger framework of the topic area.

Literature Review. The literature review provides information about what is currently known or being explored about the topic area. It should reflect a thorough job of finding, reading and analyzing the major literature relevant to your topic and question. Further, it will provide an overarching analysis of the central ideas, findings and concerns that have emerged across the literature and show connections among them.

Defense of Methodology. This section will describe the methods you used to address your question and explain why the particular methods you chose are appropriate to your study. It will also provide a reflective statement describing the assumptions embedded in the methods that you followed (sometimes called research paradigm) and how these informed your inquiry.

Presentation of Findings. This component of the project write-up presents the data from your research that addresses the project question.

Interpretation of Findings. The interpretation section describes and analyzes the themes and connections that emerged among your research findings and the relationship of your findings to existing literature.

Conclusions. This section summarizes the central conclusions you have drawn from your inquiry and any implications they may have for theory development and for professional practice (yours and others').

Implications for Future Research. Presentation of new questions that have arisen as a result of your inquiry and an explanation of how these questions might be pursued (by you or by others).

Bibliography. The bibliography should provide complete bibliographical information for each resource used in your study (e.g., books, articles, films, web sites, etc.).

Master's Project Chronology Outline