Introduction:
This Week’s Lecture:
In this week’s lecture, we focused on developing a research topic, going over a few important questions we should ask ourselves when deciding on a topic to conduct research into. These questions helped us think about a topic that would motivate us, similar to the questions we asked ourselves during the week 1 lecture. We then went through the thesis structure again, alongside the thesis proposal structure, highlighting what sections are the most important and which ones would require the most time from us. We established that the literature review, research design, methods, and schedule would be where the majority of our time would be invested in. Afterward, we spoke about the two research methods, qualitative and quantitative, comparing them both to understand the importance of each of them and see which one would be most appropriate in our cases. To further help up understand. we were given an article and were suggested to read it. It was from a European journal of Education Research Development and Policy, written by a social studies educator, Kaya Yilmaz. Yilmaz stated that when the characteristics of quantitative or qualitative are discussed, the four essential elements of the research process must be addressed.
The four essential elements of the research process:
- Epistemology – Which paradigm or worldview will inform the study design?
- Theoretical Perspective – Who or what will be studied?
- Methodology – Which research strategies will be used?
- Methods – Which research methods or tools will be used to collect and analyse data?
Lastly, we spoke about critical thinking and writing, showing us what good critical thinking is and how it should be treated. My lecturer explained that good critical thinking is systematic and should be treated as an investigation. Furthermore, our lecturer advised us on a list of questions to ask ourselves when reviewing evidence.
This Week’s Task:
Towards the end of the lecture, our lecturer set us a task to read the article mentioned above and talk further about what we would like to investigate, attempting to narrow down our ideas. Hopefully from reading through the article, i may be able to shorten the list of potential topics that i made last week, giving me a stronger idea of what i would like to research for my thesis proposal.