Assessing Research Quality in Education Policy

Catalog description

This course will introduce tools for conducting literature search and research synthesis. The focus of this course is both practical and methodological. Topics covered involve background on different parts of the research synthesis process, including problem formulation, conducting literature search, data evaluation, effect size coding, and data analysis. Further, statistical methods used for summarizing the effects found in a study (effect sizes) and for combining the results of these studies will be introduced and developed. The statistical package R will be used to conduct the statistical techniques discussed. By the end of the semester, students will be able to conduct replicable search of the literature, evaluate study quality in the context of policy research, extract, and code information from eligible studies, as well as create meta-analytic databases using appropriate statistical techniques.