Abstract:
The project is to enhance students’ abilities to conduct research for their honours project, a new element of undergraduate teaching training at HKIEd, and more broadly as part of the training of undergraduates in education and social sciences. Taking into account some of the issues encountered in implementing the honours project, the project reviewed strengths and weaknesses in student’s research skills, catalogued resources for teaching and learning such skills and developed new ones, including highly operational items such as checklists and other tools of planning and review in the many research phases. The project promoted use of the resources through all the undergraduate years by involving most teaching staff in the development and to recommend consistent exposure of students to a set of standards and practices. The project also enhanced the learning of research skills by reviewing assessment tasks and suggesting their adjustments in all courses in programmes taught by the department to progressively build student’s research abilities over the entire duration of their study at the Institute. After the initial development, assessment and revision of the resources were made in the following academic year, and the resources and recommendations would be tried out and modified.
Code:
T0065
Principal Project Supervisors:
Subjects:
Start Date:
01 Dec 2009
End Date:
30 Sep 2011
Status:
Completed
Result:
The project conducted two rounds survey to investigate students’ self-reported strengths and weaknesses of research-related skills. Second round of survey mentioned above also collected a group of year-3 students’ review whether and how courses in each of the departments’ programmes help develop research skills during the year of study. Based on the results, online resources for teaching and learning research skills were developed, the bulk of which are 67 glossary entries, 3 reference articles, 13 suggested readings, 9 websites and 5 checklists and worksheets.
The develop resources were used in teaching the General Research Method course offered by Department of Social Sciences (SSC) on semester 2 in 2009-2010. Students in the relevant Research Method course were surveyed and 83% of them agreed or agreed strongly that they would revisit the site again when they do research. It was also found that Research report samples and articles about research knowledge were the two main items requested by students.
Impact:
The developed resources were used in teaching the General Research Method course offered by SSC in semester 2, 2009-2010.
Relevant findings were provided in a combined report on student research skills. Other fact-finding activities were presented at the departmental retreat in December 2010.
Financial Year:
2009-10
Type:
TDG