Graduate Students' Expectations of an Introductory Research Methods Course.

While there is a scattered literature base on teaching research methods courses, there is very little literature that speaks to what and how students learn in research methods courses. Students are often described as coming to the course not seeing its relevance, bringing negative attitudes and low motivation with them. The purpose of this exploratory mixed methods study was to investigate graduate student attitudes toward research, expectations of an introductory research methods course, and any relationship between the two. A total of 117 students completed the Attitudes Toward Research scale and a series of open-ended questions: Results indicate these graduate students actually came in with moderate to high positive attitudes toward research and mixed expectations about what the course would entail. Students expected research methods to be difficult, but they did not report much anxiety related to research. Implications for teaching and future research are discussed.Although the focus of most research methods education studies has been on teaching techniques (Author, under review; Deem & Lucas, 2006), they often provide anecdotal statements about the characteristics of students taking these courses. First, authors characterize students as failing to see the relevance of the course to their personal and professional lives (Braguglia & Jackson, 2012; Briggs, Brown, Gardner & Davidson, 2009; Deem & Lucas, 2006; Dorfman & Lipscomb, 2005; Edwards & Thatcher, 2004; Emery & Kalscheur, 2000; Fabelo-Alcover, 2002; Hardcastle & Bisman, 2003; Moulding & Hadley, 2010; Murtonen, Olkinura, Tynjala, & Lehtinen, 2008; Papan as tasiou & Zembylas, 2008; Rodriguez & Toews, 2005; Spronken-Smith, 2005; Vandiver & Walsh, 2010). The use of student-driven research projects research team. With a response rate of 85%, and data collection cutting across five consecutive semesters, this sample is considered representative of all graduate education students taking this course.Data SourcesI asked course instructors to administer two surveys on the first day of class prior to any discussion of course content. The first survey is the Attitudes Toward Research (ATR) scale developed by Papanastasiou (2005). This scale includes 32, 7point Likert-type items, generating quantitative data related to students' attitudes. The scale is further broken down into five subscales: research usefulness for profession, research anxiety, positive attitudes toward research, relevance to life, and research difficulty. Papanastasiou (2005) reported a 0.948 reliability coefficient for the full scale, with subscale reliabilities ranging from 0.711 to 0.929. Papanastasiou and Zembylas (2008) reported similar reliabilities with the same measure (.938 overall and ranges from.701 to .932 for the subscales). They also reported correlations among the five subscales ranging from 0.168 to 0.669. Second, I created a set of three open-ended questions asking students to list their expectations for what they are going to learn and what they hope to leam in the course, generating qualitative data related to students' expectations. As part of this survey I also asked students to rate how difficult they expect the course to be on a scale from 1 - 6 (1 being easy and 6 being difficult) and to explain why they chose that rating. 1 pilot tested the questions with a set of master's students taking the course in spring 2011 (prior to the study reported here) and made slight modifications based on their recommendations. Hie final questions asked, in addition to the rating question, included:What do you expect to learn this semester in this course? How would you describe what educational research is to someone not taking this course? What do you need most to help you leam in this course? ResultsI first analyzed the Attitudes Toward Research scale results by focusing on the five subscales, after recoding negativelyworded items. …