Introduction
I am studying at Master of Education, the
University of Adelaide. At the beginning of this semester, one of compulsory
courses that I had to take was Research Design. Actually, I did not opt this
course due to its status of compulsory, but I took it because I liked
research—I was involving in student research organization, participating in
research competition and assisting my lecturers in doing research. If it were
an elective study, I would keep taking it. Even I also selected Introduction to
Quantitative Educational Method as I thought this course was also relating to
research, and had mutual support with Research Design.
After
learning the course, I undergo a lot of enhancement. In this essay I will
present some points regarding my learning improvement during the course. The
alteration that I obtain happens in terms of paradigm, knowledge, skills and
relation to other students.
Writing Literature Review
In my undergraduate university, I accustomed
to collate some research proposals in which literature review was the
obligatory component in these documents. Because of this experience, I did not upset
when I saw literature review as a content of Research Design course. However,
when the lecturer delivered this topic in the class a couple weeks later, I came
across that there was a different concept between literature review here and
the one that I used to write in the past.
I
felt that this course helped me understand the concept of literature review. As
additional effort, I searched for material on internet related to this lesson. But
the most important thing that I did was writing a literature review. I believed
that learning by practice was more effective than just reading and listening
without demonstration. As a result, I understood this lesson and could present
my literature review in the class.
Writing Systematic Review
Systematic
review sounds like literature review. However, both are unlike although have
similarities as well. Systematic review is a paper focusing on the question
that want to answer by identifying, apprising, analyzing, and synthesizing the
high qualified research evidences. Hence, the challenge in composing a systematic
review is collecting excellent publications that relate to the topic or
research question.
Although
systematic review was totally new for me in this semester, I am confidence to
say that now, at the end of semester “I comprehend and can collate a systematic
review”. This is because major assignment in this course was writing a systematic
review, possessing high proportion (60%). Consequently, I had to allocate a lot
of time and energy to complete this assignment. This made me reread the
materials from the lecturer again and again and look for other resources on
internet.
Avoiding Plagiarism, Searching
Reference and Creating Citation
If there was a favorite subject in this
course, I would vote Avoiding Plagiarism, Searching Reference and Creating
Citation. This was not because this topic was more important than others—all
topics were really helpful—but this was because in this lesson I met Endnote
software and learnt how to operate it.
Endnote
was a memorable topic for me. Before I knew this software, I thought that
looking for references was very difficult and I could not well organize the
articles I downloaded. In addition, citing them manually needed high
concentration because sometimes, I forgot writing the reference in bibliography.
Since
using Endnote, all of these difficulties became easy. I could create my own
library in the software and attached PDF files from my drive to the library. I
did not need to type manually the articles’ identity anymore since I could directly
import their details from online database such as Google Scholar and Scopus. And
when I wanted to cite a statement from the files to Microsoft Word document, I
just needed to click a few times of Endnote toolbar. What a truly remarkable
moment was when the details was automatically written in bibliography. Not only
that, I could change the referencing style as well, e.g. Harvard or APA style.
Moreover,
I took full advantage of applying Endnote in doing assignments in other courses,
which majority of them were writing. As we know, in academic writing citing the
references had to be conducted to avoid plagiarism, an extraordinary crime in
academic world. So, I would say that utilizing this software could help me evade
plagiarism.
Student name :
Wahyuddin
ID number :
1685024
Subject :
Research Design
Program : Master of Education
School :
Education
University :
The University of Adelaide
Date :
10 November 2015
