Presented by Dr. Diana Mindrila and Dr. Elizabeth Pope

At UWG, research faculty have created the Virtual Research Center (VRC). The VRC is a place for faculty and students to learn more about the ins and outs of qualitative and quantitative research and designs. The VRC has information about theory, research designs, methods, and more. In this session, Dr. Mindrila and Dr. Pope will walk through the VRC and invite feedback from attendees. We are looking to update the VRC, so this session will allow attendees to see what's there and give their suggestions on how to make it even better!

Date: More information coming soon!

Presented by Dr. Elizabeth Pope

When writing a dissertation, students are expected to cover specific content in each chapter. While unique to each dissertation, the content of each chapter also falls within a prescribed outline. To help students with writing each chapter and ensuring they include expected content, EDSI faculty have created the Dissertation Checklists. Using these checklists is not required by faculty or students, but several faculty in the EDSI program also use the Checklists to assess their students' work. In this session, Dr. Pope will review the Checklists for Chapters 1, 2, & 3 in dissertations and cover best use for students and how faculty might use the checklists in evaluating dissertation drafts.

Date: More information coming soon!

Presented by Dr. Phillip Grant

When conducting a qualitative dissertation, writing out what is it you do (or will do) is essential to the reader's understanding of your study. In this session, Dr. Grant will discuss steps to writing up your data collection plan in a qualitative dissertation for those who are preparing a dissertation proposal or for those who are currently in the data collection/analysis phase. This session will cover data collection instrumentation, data collection strategies, and research ethics.

Date: More information coming soon!

Presented by Dr. Marsha Simon

This session is designed to walk you through discussing the limitations of your dissertation while highlighting its strengths. There may be limitations to a study based on the methodological approach used and it is important to know what the most common ones are and note how they align with the study's goals.

Date: More information coming soon!

Presented by Dr. Matt Varga, Jean Cook, and Dr. Elizabeth Pope

Completing a literature review is an integral part of any research project. With so many resources available digitally, a variety of technologies can be used to conduct a more efficient literature review. This session will provide guidance on how to use four specific digital tools to complete literature reviews: Excel, EndNote, Zotero, and Atlas.ti. Participants will be introduced to best practices in using each of these tools. The session will end with time for questions.

Date: More information coming soon! 

Presented by Dr. Diana Mindrila

The session will provide information on planning and describing data collection procedures for quantitative research projects. We will discuss the identification of appropriate data sources and examine the advantages and disadvantages of frequently used sampling and instrumentation procedures. Further, we will outline the information that needs to be included in the "data collection" section of the dissertation proposal and analyze examples of research proposals.

Date: More information coming soon!

Presented by a panel of College of Education faculty

Session Description:

Please join us for an IRB information session - open to all UWG College of Education doctoral students! A panel of College of Education faculty will provide an overview of the IRB process specific to the dissertation, outline the different types of IRB applications, identify strategies on conducting research (specifically during COVID!), and answer questions!

Date: More information coming soon

Presented by Drs. Pope, Varga, Mindrila, Grant, Simon, Morse, and Packard, Educational Research

Session Description:

This 1 hour session will offer you the opportunity to better know the fantastic faculty members who could be serving as your chair, methodologist, or possibly even your content specialist! The research faculty in our department of Leadership, Research, and School Improvement (LRS) are experts in quantitative research, qualitative research, mixed methods research, action research, and program evaluation research. They can guide you in any of our approved research designs.

Date: More information coming soon

Presented by Dr. Laurie Kimbrel, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership

Session Description:

Educators have been subjected to a variety of failed school reform efforts designed as simple solutions and political soundbites. As practitioner-researchers, we need to re-focus efforts on approaches that have real promise to improve outcomes for students rather than the politics of distraction that have been the focus of the last several decades. In this session, we will consider the power of collective efficacy, the research on high impact strategies, and the most common distractions to lasting reform. You will learn to look at potential research/dissertation topics through the lens of school improvement research in order to create a project with maximum impact in your school and potential to add value to the literature base.

Dates: More information coming soon.

Presented by Duane Theobald, Director of the UWG Writing Center

Session Description:

Writing on any level comes with many challenges. One such challenge is often finding the right sources that will benefit your argument/main point/central concept. Time must be spent finding what sources you need, but what constitutes academic research and how do you find it? In this session, participants will get a brief review of what academic research is and why it is valuable. Additionally (and more importantly), participants will get a walkthrough of how to navigate an academic database, what you need to consider while in a database, etc. Participants will leave the session knowing how to conceptualize academic research and how to locate it easily.

Date: More information coming soon.

Presented by Dr. Elizabeth Pope, Assistant Professor of Educational Research

Session Description:

In this session, I will present an overview to the concept of theoretical frameworks in research. I will discuss what theory is in research and how the concept of theoretical frameworks fits within conceptual frameworks (i.e. how a theoretical framework is related but distinct from a conceptual framework). I stress the importance of developing a theoretical framework from the literature related to a research topic and offer guidance on how to create a theoretical framework for a dissertation. Finally, I will discuss how a theoretical framework can evolve through the course of a project.

Date: More information coming soon.

Presented by Duane Theobald, Director of the UWG Writing Center

Session Description:

APA Style--the very thought of it makes some writers and scholars shudder. While we know that every discipline has a style that must be utilized, writers often feel confused and overwhelmed with the myriad of rules, examples, etc. This session will focus on key aspects of APA Style and provide examples of how certain important parts of APA should be utilized (e.g. in-text citations, entries on the References page, etc.). Additionally, participants will leave with resources that will help them as they move forward with their writing--as citation styles should not be memorized but recognized & used properly.

Date: More information coming soon.

Presented by Dr. Logan Arrington, Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology

Session Description:

Writing the results section of any research study can be a challenge. However, this is especially true for dissertations. You have collected and analyzed all of this data, but what is next? This session will address how to transform your raw results into a meaningful representation of your findings. It will cover aspects such as reporting the results of your statistical assumptions. Additionally, it is very easy for researchers to overstate the impact of their results in some cases. Following how to structure the results, this session will discuss appropriately and adequately representing your results. This topic will intertwine with a conversation about "significance" and the meaning of this term in quantitative findings. This session will be of interest to students working on quantitative or mixed method dissertation studies.

Date: More information coming soon.

Presented by Duane Theobald, Director of the UWG Writing Center

Session Description:

Remember those pesky concepts you learned years ago in your early English classes? Initially, they seem like they're only needed for those and other related classes; however, we all know that to be untrue. This session will focus on several key writing concepts that are applicable to all writing--including the dissertation that you're working on! Participants will review concepts like supporting evidence, topic sentences, integrating quotations, etc. and how they can be factored into larger-scale writing. Additionally, participants will leave with a better understanding of how the Writing Process and all the parts therein can greatly benefit their work.

Date: More information coming soon.

Presented by Dr. Mary Alice Varga, Director of the School Improvement Doctoral Program and Associate Professor of Educational Research

Session Description:

This session will provide an introduction to Mendeley. Participants will understand the core functions of Mendeley Reference Manager and the role it plays as a productivity tool in the dissertation process. Participants will install Mendeley, MS Word Plugin, and the Web Importer and leave the workshop with their own libraries built.

Date: More information coming soon. 

Presented by Dr. Logan Arrington, Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology

Session Description:

Data gathered during a research study is only as good as the instrument deployed to capture it! This session will explore two important concepts, reliability and validity, that must be considered before you deploy any instrument, researcher developed or existing. In this session, participants will learn the differences between these two concepts. Additionally, participants will learn methods/tests to examine in their instruments to ensure that their instruments are both reliable and valid.

At the conclusion of this session, students will be able to :

• Distinguish between reliability and validity
• Identify methods for ensuring an instrument is reliable
• Identify methods for ensuring an instrument is valid

Date: More information coming soon.

Presented by Dr. Elizabeth Pope, Assistant Professor of Educational Research

Session Description:

In every research study, researchers must consider what makes research "valid" and rigorous. In quantitative research, researchers consider validity and reliability in their study. For qualitative research, these terms are not accurate descriptions of the concepts necessary to create a rigorous study of high quality. We must shift our thinking to questions of trustworthiness and ask ourselves, what makes our study credible, dependable, transferable, and confirmable? It is here that we can design a high quality and rigorous qualitative study. In this presentation, I will examine concepts of quality and rigor in qualitative research and discuss common methods used to ensure them in designing a study.

Date: More information coming soon.

Presented by Dr. Elizabeth Pope, Assistant Professor of Educational Research

Session Description:

Qualitative interviews are a very common form of qualitative data collection in educational research. Researchers can even conduct studies where interviews are the sole data for the project. In this presentation, I will discuss the types of qualitative interviews (based on Roulston's six interviewing types found in Reflective Interviewing), best practices for conducting qualitative interviews, what to do after the interview is completed, and how to decide if interviews are right for your own project.

Date: More information coming soon.

Presented by Dr. Elizabeth Pope, Assistant Professor of Educational Research

Session Description:

Observations have a long history in social science research. They are a good way to generate data that is based on behavior and human interaction, rather than reported experiences from a participant regarding the phenomenon of interest in a research study. In educational research, they can be invaluable in understanding the context, environment, and interactions within any research study. After providing a brief look at the history of observations and ethnographic research, I will discuss best practices when preparing to enter the field, ethical behavior in conducting observations, writing fieldnotes, and the benefits of observational data for educational research.

Date: More information coming soon.

Presented by Dr. Elizabeth Pope, Assistant Professor of Educational Research

Session Description:

In qualitative studies, researchers often end up having A LOT of data, some of which will never be used in a project. When I was trying to decide on an approach for my dissertation (qualitative vs. quantitative), my mentor asked me: "Do you want more work on the front end or the back end?" This "back end" work is in qualitative research and refers to the time and focus it takes in organizing, managing, and analyzing qualitative data. In this presentation we will discuss the first two of those three concepts and go over strategies and technologies that help in managing qualitative data and organizing it for analysis.

Date: More information coming soon.

Presented by Dr. Elizabeth Pope, Assistant Professor of Educational Research

Session Description:

ATLAS.ti is a qualitative data management software (QDAS). Software like ATLAS.ti serve as an invaluable venue for qualitative researchers to manage, organize, and analyze their data during or after collection. As a modern qualitative researcher, learning to use a QDAS like ATLAS.ti can enhance the research process leading to a more robust and transparent analysis. This can in turn lead to a more rigorous and higher quality research project. However, this can only happen if researchers understand what QDAS can and cannot do as well as how to harness their capabilities in a powerful way. In this session, a professional trainer from ATLAS.ti will introduce you to the capabilities of ATLAS.ti Version 8. Dr. Pope, another professional trainer, will be in attendance. Questions will be answered at the end of the session.

Date:  More information coming soon.

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