Research Methods Reflections

In the past 5 weeks of this course, I have learned many things. The biggest challenge was trying to find the time to do the readings and all of the writing in such a short amount of time. After looking for articles and doing the first article analysis, I realized it was difficult to switch gears between trying to absorb information from the book and also keep up with all of the articles at the same time. After that week, I decided that I needed to really work to get the reading done as fast as possible, so that when it was time to start doing more writing, I could focus just on that.

In a past position, I was the science fair coordinator for my school. The students had to write a full research paper to go along with their project, including a literature review. Thankfully, that experience helped me with APA formatting and in understanding the flow of the full research paper.  When coaching students, I followed guidelines given to me to teach them how to write their papers, so I learned some of the things taught in this class ahead of time. I just didn’t realize the reasons why we did those things back then. Now I do. 

I feel much more equipped to read and evaluate research reports after taking this class. I hope that my writing skills have improved some too. I haven’t had to write a research paper since 1998! I hope to continue to improve in both of these areas as I go through this program. I know that I have barely begun to scratch the surface of the content available in my topic so far, so I will use what I learned in this class to help me expand my knowledge base as I proceed with the capstone project. I am glad I took this as my very first course in the program because it will be helpful all the way through.