Reflections on ED 504 – Techniques of Educational Research

After final completion of the research proposal, I reflected on how much I enjoyed taking

this course. I first registered for the course in the Fall 1 term of 2021, but due to personal reasons

I withdrew. I felt the course needed a lot of dedication and I wanted to make sure I did well. I

registered for the course again in the spring 2 term of 2022 with the same instructor, Dr. Kyla

Pratt. I have had experience in writing both quantitative and qualitative papers, but I did not

know what to expect from this course. I also made sure this was the only course I registered for

during this term. I began to feel at ease once I read the syllabus and discovered I would only be

working on the research proposal and not the full paper.

For my research proposal, I decided to focus on a problem that I have experienced within

the math department at my former school (place of employment), which was poor performance

in online math courses, specifically, college algebra. I gathered data from my classroom and

from those of peers which displayed the failing math scores on final exams. The data was

compiled to reveal the weakness (failing scores) and how this weakness impacted overall student

achievement in the course.

My topic addressed how video modeling can be used to bridge the gap between failure

and success in online college algebra. I was able to find substantial evidence among the literature

I read supporting the problem through implementation of explicit instruction and the application

of the appropriate web 2.0 tools. Reading through articles takes time and is quite a daunting task.

However, I pushed forward through the many articles I read and realized how research can be

used to solve real-life educational problems.