Institution: Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville $35,100

Project Title: Development and Dissemination of Online Instructional

Materials for the Graduate “Research Methods in Education”

Courses

Project Director: Yuliang Liu, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor/Educational Leadership Department

Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville

Box 1125

Edwardsville, IL 62026-1125

Telephone: 618/650-3293

email: yliu@siue.edu

Grant Period: April 2, 2002 to June 30 2003

Synopsis: The major goal of this project is to effectively develop and disseminate the online instructional materials for graduate “Research Methods of Education” courses completely online to any potential graduate students in education throughout the state of Illinois. Since most graduate students in education are school teachers, it is obvious that this project clearly addresses at least three goals of The Illinois Commitment: (1) higher education will join elementary and secondary education to improve teaching and learning at all levels; (2) Illinois will increase the number and diversity of citizens completing training and education programs; and (3) Illinois colleges and universities will continually improve productivity, cost-effectiveness, and accountability.

“Research Methods in Education” is a core course for all graduate students in education at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. This course is designed to introduce the graduate students to various research methods in education. At the end of this online course, students are expected to achieve the following three major objectives: (1) understand the major concepts and procedures regarding various research methods in education; (2) write and/or evaluate research proposals or manuscripts according to the American Psychological Association writing style; and (3) additionally, an indirect objective of this online course will be to improve students’ attitudes toward technology integration in education.

There is an urgent need for an online course for Research Methods in Education for graduate students in education because: (1) all master’s students in education are required to take this course; (2) most of them are nontraditional students and are full-time school teachers with teaching experiences; (3) most of them have not had experiences with developing research proposals; and (4) most of them do not have much experience with integrating online technology in their instruction.

The overall activities of this project include developing computer-mediated course modules and required support materials in the high demand graduate educational program by incorporating effective researched-based practices, professional development opportunities, and Internet collaboration technologies for the effective delivery of online instruction. The final courseware will be used by the greatest number of higher education institutions and ICN participants.

The specific activities related to the project from April 2002 to June 2003 are theoretically based on the problem-based and constructive learning models. These activities include: (1) activities for students’ knowledge measurement include developing high quality online instructional modules to facilitate students learning of the course content; identifying and developing high quality topics for each chapter of discussion on the bulletin board in the WebCT; identifying and establishing high quality existing web sites for related instructional resources for each learning module in the proposed course; developing high quality weekly online quizzes. All these will be good for students’ weekly self-examination of knowledge learning; (2) the activity for students’ performance measurement include using focus groups to identify a detailed list of potential interesting educational topics and/or problems for students to choose for the team projects, which involve the development of a complete research proposal from the beginning to the end; (3) the activity for measuring students’ attitudes toward technology integration include locating and securing the States of Concern (SoC) instrument for pretest and posttest when implementing this project; and (4) successful development of the instructor’s manual for the above proposed courseware.