Course Syllabus

Course Name: Analysis and Evaluation of Research

Course Prefix and Number: EDS 8824 OLS02 & OLS03

Term: Spring 2025

Time & Place: Thursdays 5:00pm – 7:30pm via Zoom

https://piedmont.zoom.us/j/93057431064?pwd=5NSivcnHT1mnlBHnXjpiFoWzx0wPw6.1

Meeting ID: 930 5743 1064

Passcode: 498917

Course Prerequisite(s)/Corequisite(s)

Admission to the EDS Program

Course Description

This course is designed to enable students to become critical consumers and evaluators of current educational research. Students will develop skills necessary to identify, understand, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of educational research. Throughout the course, students will locate and evaluate a collection of educational research publications and write a critical, scholarly literature review focused in a specific area of education.

Course Credit Hours: 3.0

Instructor Name: Dr. Dyer

Instructor Email Address: rdyer@piedmont.edu

Office Hours: TBD

*Please contact me to schedule an office hour appointment/Zoom meeting or email anytime with questions.

TEXTBOOK & CLASS MATERIALS

All course readings are accessible for free through the Piedmont Library. This course incorporates an array of chapters from several textbooks and leans heavily on 4 articles from recent issues of the American Educational Research Journal (AERJ). All links to course readings are included in Canvas.

STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES

After successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

Distinguish different types of quantitative and qualitative research, especially as they relate to addressing educational problems in practice
Understand the purpose and standards for excellence for each section in a research paper
Articulate strengths and weaknesses of research studies to understand when to use trustworthy empirical information to improve educational practice
Draw the appropriate inferences from various research findings
Evaluate research studies on interventions that may be used or proposed for use in their own schools
Identify threats to internal and external validity in quantitative research, and credibility and trustworthiness in qualitative research
Gather research about a practice in your area of content certification, evaluate what the research says, and discuss whether research on this practice is in alignment with what you see in your specific educational context

MINIMUM TECHNOLOGY REQUIREMENTS FOR ONLINE/HYBRID COURSES

It is the student’s responsibility to ensure that all hardware and software are ready for use prior to the start of the course. If unfamiliar with a component of the required technology, a web search for tutorials may be helpful. Students may also contact the Piedmont College IT Department here: http://it.piedmont.edu/contact.html. Equipment or software failure is not an acceptable excuse for missing a deadline.

All students must have access to:

A computer. Minimum personal computer guidelines are available at: http://it.piedmont.edu/sysreq.html. Computer labs are available on the Demorest and Athens campuses. Visit http://www.piedmont.edu/technology for the most current locations.

A broadband internet connection. This means either a high-speed DSL or a cable modem. Please make a back-up plan like a nearby coffee shop with wi-fi. Lack of internet access is not an acceptable excuse for missing a deadline.

Canvas is the online learning system of Piedmont College. Access Canvas at https://piedmont.instructure.com/login/ldap.

Your Piedmont Lions student email account. This is available within a few days of registration for new students at: http://it.piedmont.edu/mail.html. Faculty and staff at Piedmont College are required to communicate with students electronically only to the student’s Piedmont Lions account or through Canvas. Students should also use only use their Piedmont Lions email for all electronic communications with faculty and staff.

Current word processing and presentation software. Microsoft Office is available for all Piedmont College students to download on up to five devices at: http://it.piedmont.edu/office365.html.

GRADING SCALE

A 90-100% Work meets standards of excellence

B 80-89% Work exceeds acceptable standards

C 70-79% Work meets acceptable standards

D 60-69% Work does not meet acceptable standards

F 0-59% Not acceptable

See Overview of Assignments for point distribution.

CLASS POLICIES:

ATTENDANCE POLICY

Attendance plays a fundamental role in the transfer of knowledge in college courses. Therefore, you are warmly invited, encouraged, and expected to attend all class meetings for this course. Attendance will be important not only for your absorption of the course content, but also for our ability as a class to build a positive and effective community. Essentially, your presence in class matters.

If a student cannot attend a scheduled class meeting, or discussion board participation, appropriate documentation must be provided as soon as possible to the professor for the consideration of excusing the absence. Excused absences will be accommodated. Unexcused absences will not be accommodated. For both excused and unexcused absences it is the responsibility of the student to procure missed material by completing the assigned readings and/or assignments.

Multiple absences (regardless of the reason) will result in a discussion with the student’s advisor and dean, and that discussion may involve recommendation for an administrative withdrawal from the course.

SUBMISSION POLICY

For all assignments, please refer to the following guidelines:

For written assignments, APA 7rules must be used.
For file uploads, please ensure that your upload has the proper formatting (APA) and transfers correctly to platforms such as Canvas.
Please note, assignments will not be “pre-graded” or scanned to checked for errors before they are submitted.
PLAGIARISM-
- Using some else's phrases and/or complete sentences without quoting and citing the information will result in receiving a 0.0, an “F”, on the assignment…without an opportunity to resubmit.
- Open AI
- Self-Plagiarism
- Avoid this issue by using your own words, citing sources used, and using Turnitin & Grammarly features. The first offense receives an “F”, the second offense receives a referral to the dean for academic exclusion.
- Other helpful resources include the APA Manual (7^th edition), the Piedmont Academic Integrity Policy, your academic advisors, and/or this website: https://copyleaks.com/blog/types-of-plagiarism .

LATE WORK POLICY

Late assignments will receive a 10% -point deduction per day for up to three days past the due date. For example, if the due date is Friday, you can turn it in up until Monday, but if it is turned in by Monday, you would only be able to receive a maximum of 70%. After the allotted late days have passed, the assignment will not be accepted.

Final exam assignments may not be submitted late.

MAKE-UP POLICY

Assignments cannot be “made-up” in this class. Additionally, they cannot be resubmitted for re-grading after they have been graded and returned to the student.

COURSE DESIGN

This course will be facilitated as an online, synchronous class in which the material will be organized into 15-modules.

The course content is organized into two main areas of focus:

Focus 1: Understanding and evaluating peer-reviewed journal articles
Focus 2: Exploring specific research designs approaches

Each week, you will have approximately 1 module to complete. Because these are online modules, please schedule your time wisely, making sure that you have time to complete assigned readings and assignments. Each module will include the following tasks:

Course Reading(s)	Scholarly article readings will be assigned
Module Activities & Assessments	Most modules ask you to complete an analysis paper activity on journal articles and a quiz on the assigned readings for that module.
Assignments (in addition to module activity rhythms)	Graded assignments include the Literature Review, the Field Experience and reflection, and the Program Outcome Reflection Log. Please note that analysis paper activities and module quizzes (above) are also graded activities.

Seat Time Requirements:

150 minutes of documented “seat time” (beyond required reading) per week is mandated for hybrid and online 15-week courses. This 3-hour course thus requires a total of 2,250 minutes of seat time.

OVERVIEW OF ASSIGNMENTS

Analysis paper activities 40%

Module quizzes 10%

Literature review culminating project 40%

Literature review building assignments (15%)

Literature review final submission (25%)

Research in Practice Activity 10%

Total: 100%

** Program requirements (Field Experience Reflection, Program Outcome Reflection Log) – required for course completion, but not graded.

DESCRIPTION OF ASSIGNMENTS

Reflection activities (40% of total grade): The purpose of these analysis/reflection activities is to learn what the primary purpose is of each section in a research article and evaluate recently published articles with that information in mind. There are specific questions to answer for each analysis reflection, but they will be similar across modules so there will be a predictable rhythm for this activity each module. We will do these analyses in the form of classroom discussions and jigsaw participation. You will be responsible for analyzing an article section of your assigned module and lead a 5-minute discussion during one of our live sessions. The rest of your analysis grade will come from your general feedback and responses/participation during our discussions on the articles that you are not responsible for.

Module quizzes (10% of total grade): You will read select chapters from a few different textbooks throughout the course and will test your knowledge of the textbook readings through a quiz each module. Textbook readings will introduce some ideas that you can use as you reflect on the research articles in your analysis paper activity each module.

Literature review culminating project (40% of total grade): In order to make decisions based on empirically valid information, we need to know how to read, understand, and evaluate academic literature on a topic. Ultimately, learning how scholarly articles discuss educational practices will allow you to identify the most promising educational strategies for your context. You will build and practice these skills in the context of a literature review culminating project.

As you learn about typical conventions in research articles and how different researchers approach writing a research article, you will also be collecting peer-reviewed journal articles and building a literature review on a topic relevant to a practice in your area of content certification. You will choose an instructional method, educational policy or practice in your area of content certification and investigate what the research has to say about this topic. After collecting relevant articles, describing what they have to say on your topic of choice, and organizing them in appropriate themes, you will reflect on whether the practices you see in your educational context align with what the research says about those practices.

Literature review building assignments (15% total) timeline:

Submit topic (Module 2)
Annotated bibliography for 10 references (Module 5)
Annotated bibliography for 15 references (Module 8)
Literature review draft (Module 11)

Literature review final submission (25%)

Literature review final submission (Module 15)

Check Canvas for a full description of each of these steps.

Research in Practice Activity (10% of Total Grade): The Research in Practice Activity is a mid-semester activity where you will investigate an instructional practice or educational policy relevant to your school context and write about the extent to which you see this topic in alignment with what the recent academic research has to say about it. In this way, you can reflect on promising practices in your context and take steps toward alignment between research and practice in this area. This activity can count for your field experience for this course.

The purpose of field experiences is to provide candidates with opportunities to connect new understandings developed in coursework to authentic school-related contexts. This includes observation, practice, application of knowledge and skills, and demonstration of dispositions expected of teacher-leaders, and requires 2 hours of experience outside of traditional classroom time. Candidates must complete this field experience in order the receive a final grade in the course.

Program Requirements (required to complete course but ungraded): For Piedmont College’s EdS Program, each course will require 1) a Field Experience (2 hours), 2) documentation of the Field Experience in the Field Experience Reflection, and 3) completion of the Program Outcome Reflection Log. The field experience is discussed in the Data in Practice section of the syllabus.

Field Experience Reflection: The purpose of the Field Experience Reflection is to document what you did for the field experience requirement and discuss connections to course content. Template, guidelines, and a rubric will be provided.

Program Outcome Reflection Log: The purpose of the Program Outcome Reflection Log is to promote honest and on-going reflection, a central habit of mind for developing teacher leaders. For this assignment, you will reflect on the sum of your experiences in the (online) classroom, readings, activities, and field experiences. With the template provided, you will reflect on Program Outcome #2 and one additional outcome of your choice and compose structured reflections that connect your experiences in the course to your gradual mastery of those outcomes. Guidelines and a rubric will be provided.

COURSE SCHEDULE: See end of Syllabus.

PIEDMONT POLICIES

Non-Discrimination Policy: It is the policy of Piedmont University not to discriminate in its educational programs, activities, or employment on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, race, age, religion, color, national or ethnic origin, veteran status, genetic information, or any other category protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

Piedmont University adheres to the federal definition of a credit hour as an amount of work represented in intended learning outcomes and verified by evidence of student achievement. For the purposes of this definition, an instructional hour equates to direct instruction of 750 minutes for each credit hour awarded. The standard expectation for direct instruction classes is that students will spend a minimum of two hours outside the classroom for each hour spent in class, which is, 1500 minutes per credit hour awarded. Courses that are offered on a schedule other than the full 15-week semester contain the same number of hours as if the course were scheduled for a full semester. No reduction in direct instruction time or work time outside of class is permitted for courses offered in accelerated terms.

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Courtney Snow, M.Ed., Title IX Coordinator Director of Compliance, Equity & Inclusion Daniel Hall 303 D csnow@piedmont.edu (706)778-8500 x1504

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Statement on Academic Integrity: Students must be familiar with the university academic integrity policy. Plagiarism and other violations of this policy will not be tolerated. Instructors must send any academic integrity concerns directly to the dean who is responsible for the discipline in which the course is taught. For additional resources regarding academic integrity, please investigate the Library’s libguide on the topic: https://library.piedmont.edu/academicintegrity.

Directives on Completion of Student Work: Course activities designated as quizzes, tests and exams are always to be completed by a student individually and without assistance from other people or resources UNLESS permission for collaboration or the use of external resources is explicitly permitted by the course professor(s). Hence all quizzes, tests and exams are to be considered closed- book/closed-notes and closed-internet (e.g., Google searches). Artificial intelligence apps are also banned on quizzes, tests and exams unless explicitly permitted by the course professor(s).

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Withdrawal Policy: Within the first several days of a term, students may add and drop courses with the permission of their advisor. The ranges for drop/add vary depending on the term (Fall, Spring, or Summer) and duration of the class (8 week or 15 week). Students should check the academic calendar for specific information. After this time, students may withdraw from a class. Please refer to the university catalog at https://piedmont.smartcatalogiq.com/2023-2024/undergraduate-catalog/student- academic-records-undergraduate-and-graduate/grades/withdrawal-from-classes/ for the particulars regarding the withdrawal policy.

Excused Absence Policy: Student absences for university-sanctioned events are generally considered excused absences because they are supportive of the university program. However, there are exceptions to the policy as noted in the University catalog. When absences are excused, instructors must allow students to make up any work that has been missed. Students are responsible for notifying their instructors, in advance, about absences from class due to participation in university-sanctioned events. See full policy in the University catalog at https://piedmont.smartcatalogiq.com/2023- 2024/undergraduate-catalog/academic-program/regulations/class-attendance-and-absences/.

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TENTATIVE COURSE SCHEDULE: Spring 2025

Module

Topics

Readings

Assignments/Activities Due

Module 1

1/9/2025

Journal Articles and the Peer Review Process

c Textbook chapter on peer-reviewed journals

c How to Identify a Scholarly, Peer-Reviewed Journal Article

c 2 scholarly articles

**All readings will be linked in Canvas

c Reflection #1

c Quiz #1

Due 1/16/2025

Module 2

First Synchronous Meeting

1/16/2025

The Introduction and Setting Up a Research Article

c Textbook chapter on introduction and research questions

c 4 peer-reviewed journal articles

c Reflection #2

c Quiz #2

c Submit topic of interest and 5 peer-reviewed journal articles on this topic

Due 1/23/2025

Module 3

1/23/2025

Literature Review and Judging References

c Textbook chapter on literature review

c 4 peer-reviewed journal articles

c Reflection #3

c Quiz #3

Due 1/30/2025

Module 4

Second Synchronous Meeting

1/30/2025

Designing Research Questions

c Textbook chapter on introduction and research questions

c 4 peer-reviewed journal articles

c Reflection #4

c Quiz #4

Due 2/6/2025

Module 5

2/6/2025

The Methods Section

c Textbook chapter on research design and methods

c 4 peer-reviewed journals article

c Reflection #5

c Quiz #5

c Submit annotated bibliography summarizing the basic ideas for 10 relevant articles

Due 2/13/2025

Module 6

Third Synchronous Meeting

2/13/2025

Data Analysis

c 2 textbook chapters on data analysis

c 4 peer-reviewed journals article

c Reflection #6

c Quiz #6

Due 2/27/2025

Module 7

Fourth Synchronous Meeting

2/27/2025

Results and Findings

c Textbook chapter on results and findings

c 4 peer-reviewed journals article

c Reflection #7

c Quiz #7

Due 3/6/2025

Module 8

3/6/2025

Discussion/Conclusion Sections and What Makes an Appropriate Takeaway from Research

c 2 textbook chapters on discussion/conclusion

c 4 peer-reviewed journals article

c Reflection #8

c Quiz #8

c Submit annotated bibliography for 15 relevant articles in themes

Due 03/13/2025

Module 9

Fifth Synchronous Meeting

03/13/2025

Quantitative Designs I

c 3 textbook chapters on quantitative designs

c Quiz #9

Due 03/20/2025

Module 10

Sixth Synchronous Meeting

03/20/2025

Quantitative Designs II

c 3 textbook chapters on quantitative designs

c Reflection #9

c Quiz #10

Due 03/27/2025

Module 11

03/27/2025

Qualitative Designs I

c 3 textbook chapters on qualitative designs

c Quiz #11

c Submit literature review first draft

Due 04/03/2025

Module 12

04/10/2025

Qualitative Designs II

c 3 textbook chapters on qualitative designs

c Reflection #10

c Quiz #12

Due 04/17/2025

Module 13

Seventh Synchronous Meeting

04/17/2025

Mixed Methods Designs I

c 3 textbook chapter on mixed methods designs

c Quiz #13

c Submit Research in Practice Activity Paper

Due 04/24/2025

Module 14

04/24/2025

Mixed Methods Designs II

c 3 textbook chapter on mixed methods designs

c Reflection #11

c Quiz #14

Due 05/01/2025

Module 15

Eighth Synchronous Meeting

05/01/2025

After all this, what does evidence-based mean?

c 2 articles on evidence-based ideas

c 3 textbook chapters on validity, reliability, and trustworthiness (skim)

c Submit final literature review

c Submit program field experience reflection

c Submit program outcome reflection

c Course Evaluation

Due 05/03/2025