Intro to Academic Writing and Methods in Higher Education Research

Catalog description

This course provides an introduction to academic writing and research methods in the field of higher education. In the first half of this course, students will develop strong academic writing skills and habits. Students will learn how to identify an area of research, propose one or several research questions, assess and synthesize scholarly literature for the purposes of conducting a literature review, and deploy theory to study their phenomenon. In the second half of this course, students will be introduced to popular research methodologies used to study higher education topics. This includes qualitative approaches (e.g., case study, grounded theory, narrative inquiry, portraiture, etc.), quantitative approaches (e.g., descriptive statistics, multiple regression, path analyses, etc.), and mixed methods approaches (e.g., explanatory designs, exploratory designs, complex and newly emergent designs, etc.). By the end of this course students will complete their own original research proposal using insights from the course.