Research Methods Learning goals

To form my learning goals I talked to Meredith Wong, who is a second year AAD student currently conducting her terminal research project. Her project is studying how community arts education programs influence self-efficacy. The methods that she is using to conduct her research are all qualitative and consist mostly of literature review on various community arts programs. Her methodology is a logic model – that is, a visual description of how resources and activities of a given educational program produce outcomes and eventually impacts.

From this conversation, I have developed some of my own learning goals for this class:

-I know it’s not necessarily required for this course, but I would like to have at least a general idea of my terminal research topic by the end of the term.

-Talking with Meredith about the logic model methodology made me realize that I don’t know all that much about different methodologies. I would like to expand my understanding in this area.

-I would also like to learn a sort of “best practices” for conducting academic research in this field. My undergrad degrees were both literature-focused, which made conducting research somewhat straightforward. AAD walks the line between “academic” and “professional” and I’m interested to see how that manifests in research.

-I have an idea of a lot of different research methods, but I would like to know actual names and categorizations for them, even if it would only serve to give a better elevator speech about my topic in the future.