Educational programs often have devoted programs to student’s research competence development. Students do however report to be feeling overwhelmed and unprepared when doing different kinds of research for their thesis. This brings about an extra workload for students as well as teachers. The goal of this project is to develop, refine and embed (online) teaching materials about qualitative research, to ease the burden students and teachers experience when confronted with qualitative research. 

Background

In all of educational programs of the section of Education, a part of the program is devoted to students’ research competence development. This part of the program is experienced as challenging, but educative and culminates in prize-winning, high-quality theses. However, in this preparation, students are most strongly trained within a post-positivist paradigm and quantitative data collection and analysis skills. Students doing different kind of research for their (BA / MA) thesis report feeling unprepared and overwhelmed. Bringing their work up to a sufficient level requires considerable extra investment from their supervisors and students, typically taken up on an individual basis.  

With the university-wide increasing appreciation for public engagement, community engaged learning, and action learning, this lack of preparation is something we need to address. This project aims to do so by developing, refining and embedding such educational materials about qualitative research (in a broad sense) for different programs. In doing so, we also expect to contribute to the university-wide ambition of educating students about open science, specifically for qualitative research.  

Project description

Our point of departure is that addressing qualitative research effectively needs to go beyond the discrete teaching of “how to’s”. There is no “one way” or set of ways to “do” qualitative research independent of an exploration and selection of research paradigm. This would be realized via modules that build upon each other and become increasingly complex. The basic modules would apply at the bachelor and pre-master levels and the subsequent modules would address the knowledge and skills needed at the master’s level, and so on. These modules would be designed to stand alone, meaning that students and possibly professionals (e.g., teachers) could access them independently, and supervisors (and teachers) could use them and/or refer students to them in conjunction with supervision.  For these materials the following steps are necessary:

• Evaluation and refinement of already developed materials.
• Productively embedding of the materials in different programs

Aims and results

The intended outcomes are: 

1. Overview of where in the curricula of the different programs what kind of materials about qualitative research would be beneficial to develop and/or refine. We expect substantial overlap, warranting the cross-curricular approach.
2. (Online) Educational materials about qualitative research developed and refined in close consultation with teachers and students. These materials can be used in different programs, and possibly for wider audiences.
3. Structural embedding of these materials in different relevant components the Educational Sciences programs and GST.

This is a two year project. Although the emphasis in year 1 lies with the development and refinement and in year 2 with embedding, we deliberately plan for cyclical development, refinement and embedding of different the materials in both years. What will be done, will be tailored to the to-be-developed materials. For example, the materials about qualitative open science need to be created without much to build on, whereas the lectures on interviewing and observing have been used by different students in different programs.