Ms. Jones stared at the stack of biology quizzes and wondered what went wrong. She thought about the lesson plans and wondered what she should have done differently. Ms. Jones is not alone in wondering how to improve student learning and classroom instruction. To improve student achievement, educators must determine what is working and what is…

The leading text in the field of action research, "Action Research: A Guide for the Teacher Researcher" is known for its practical, step-by-step guidance for teachers on how to do research in classrooms. Drawing on his extensive experience working directly with teachers and principals to help them learn how to conduct action research…

Conducting research and reporting the results are at the heart of academic work, yet many teachers hesitate to incorporate student research projects into their curriculum because they're unsure of how or where to begin. In "Student Research Done Right!" Lisa Scherff and Leslie S. Rush make the case that all high school and college…

In this new book from Routledge and MiddleWeb, author Angie Miller shows how you can turn your students into informed citizens by teaching them how to research effectively. In today's information-saturated world research skills have moved beyond fact-finding, into fact-sifting, fact-sorting, and fact-assessing. Miller shows you how to help…

Course: Mixed-Method Communication Research Methods. Objective: The purpose of this semester-long activity is to provide students with opportunities to cultivate mixed-method communication research skills through a social justice-informed service-learning format. Completing this course, students will be able to: recognize the unique strengths of…

When a college professor who teaches research methods to graduate education students was approached by a local public urban elementary school to help them teach research skills to 4th-graders, it was thought that the process would be simple--take what we did at the college level and differentiate it for the childhood classroom. This article will…

Content analysis is a valuable research tool for social scientists that unfortunately can prove challenging to teach to undergraduate students. Published classroom exercises designed to teach content analysis have thus far been predominantly envisioned as lengthy projects for upper-level courses. A brief and engaging exercise may be more…

Faced with doing research, students are often hesitant. Most graduate students have never conducted extensive research, having few qualifications or little technical skills. This article focuses on helping students acquire research interests, understanding and skills by using an experiential research group model. The purpose of this article is to…

Objective: Students will develop positive attitudes toward communication research by linking new values and principles with the familiar values and principles contained in children's literature. Course: Communication Research Methods.

This paper proposes an argument framework for the teaching of null hypothesis statistical testing and its application in support of research. Elements of the Toulmin (1958) model of argument are used to illustrate the use of p values and Type I and Type II error rates in support of claims about statistical parameters and subject matter research…

This paper is the result of a voluntary service-learning component in a qualitative research methods course. For this course, the service-learning project was the evaluation of the benefits to volunteers who work a crisis hotline for a local crisis intervention center. The service-learning course model used in this paper most closely resembles the…

Modern composition instructors often use and teach research methods for Internet search engines and electronic databases. It is not their intent to turn back the clock. However, if they can help students connect the world of Internet searches and the university library, they can promote information literacy in its broadest sense by developing…

Drawing on experiences in his social studies classroom, Houman Harouni evaluates both the challenges and possibilities of helping high school students develop critical research skills. The author describes how he used Wikipedia to design classroom activities that address issues of authorship, neutrality, and reliability in information gathering.…

"Seven Rules for Social Research" teaches social scientists how to get the most out of their technical skills and tools, providing a resource that fully describes the strategies and concepts no researcher or student of human behavior can do without. Glenn Firebaugh provides indispensable practical guidance for anyone doing research in the social…

The increasingly diverse backgrounds of today's graduate students have resulted in a wide range of ideas about what graduate school actually entails and what is expected of the students. Therefore, a graduate course titled "Theory and Methods of Research" was developed and is required for all chemical engineering graduate students at…