INT6067 Research Methods and Inquiry

How INT6067 is assessed

The three weighted components are published in the course outline and total one hundred per cent, and the marking sheet issued for this offering breaks each of them into named items. The fourth row carries no weight because it is not a marked component: attendance is also a separate pass condition, with a minimum attendance requirement of 80% for full time students and 70% for part time students and a fail grade for the course stated as the consequence of not meeting it. Two further rules apply before the end of the semester. Late submission is not allowed, and the individual report is asked to keep its similarity index at or below fifteen per cent. Confirm the current weights, deadlines and submission settings on the course Moodle page.

Current INT6067 dates

Dates are as published in the published teaching schedule, the assessment instruction and the submission points on the course site for this offering. Confirm exact deadlines and submission settings in the live LMS.

What INT6067 covers

Nine chapters follow the taught sequence, from research design and project type through topic framing, literature review and article critique to qualitative and quantitative method, the rules on generative tools, and the proposal itself.

Its published aim is that you understand what research design and method in this field rest on, well enough to develop your own research proposal, built on a literature review, a statement of the problem and a design with appropriate methods. The deliverable is named in the aim, and that is the single most useful thing to know about the course.

Nothing is assessed by examination.

Sixty per cent of the mark is one document you write alone, thirty per cent is one fifteen minute talk you give in a group of five or six, and ten per cent is participation.

The proposal you submit at the end is carried out in the independent project course that follows, so a question chosen carelessly in November is a question you live with for two semesters.

Two rules sit outside the marked components and can still end the course.

Attendance is a separate pass condition: the minimum attendance requirement is 80% for full time students and 70% for part time students, and the course materials state that students who fail to meet it are given a fail grade for the course.

Late submission is not allowed, so a deadline missed by an hour is a deadline missed.

Research and Research Design

The course opens by fixing what counts as inquiry: systematic investigation carried out to describe, explain, predict or control an observed phenomenon.

Those four verbs are not interchangeable, and each obliges a different kind of evidence, which is why the first decision in any design is which of them you are claiming.

The chapter separates design from method, since two studies can share every technique and answer different questions, and it sets out the short list of decisions a design has to settle before a reader can evaluate it: who is studied and how many, what is measured and with what, over what period, against what comparison, and how the evidence will be reduced to something inspectable.

Research Projects and Capstone Projects

The project that follows this course comes in two kinds, and the fork is about audience rather than difficulty.

A research project prepares you for further study and transfers knowledge to a wider scholarly community; a capstone project prepares you for employment and transfers knowledge in work related contexts, with the central aim lying in putting knowledge that already exists together and applying it. The route decides what your expected outputs and timeline sections can promise, so it belongs in the proposal rather than after it.

The chapter also catalogues what each route hands over, from a research report to a functional prototype with its documentation.

Finding a Topic and Framing the Problem

Partway through the semester you submit a research or project title, and from that point your reading and your method answer to it.

The chapter works five gates in order: choose an area the department supervises, fix the context before the technology, name the population and the setting and the person who grants access, convert the aim into something observable, and locate the gap in print.

The last gate is the one students find hardest and the one most easily systematised, because reviews state their own limitations and those statements are gaps handed to you with a citation attached.

Literature Review: Searching, Reading and Synthesis

A literature review here is an argument about what has and has not been established, and it is built by reading other people's method sections at least as carefully as their findings.

The chapter covers where to search, since the course issues a list of indexed journals in this field and the group task requires an article from that literature; how to screen against written criteria, since published reviews in this area discard between ninety-four and ninety-seven per cent of what they retrieve; and how to move from summary to synthesis by changing the unit from the article to the claim.

Two of the five criteria in the university's grade descriptors are decided in this section.

Critically Reviewing a Journal Article

The group task is the most precisely specified piece of work in the course.

In groups of five or six you have fifteen minutes to review one indexed article, covering its literature, its theoretical framing, its methods and its findings, then drawing conclusions and reflecting on the review process itself. The marking sheet concentrates twenty of the thirty marks on the discussion of those components, which means the talk should spend most of its time there rather than on introducing the article.

The chapter supplies six probes that work on any empirical study and separates two judgements the brief asks for independently: whether a method was appropriate and whether it was effective.

Qualitative Research and Methods

The course hands out a five step procedure for qualitative work: record the classroom, transcribe movement and discourse, build a coding scheme, code against it, and analyse the codes into categories and themes.

Every serious decision hides inside one of those lines. The chapter builds a coding scheme from the two starting labels the handout gives, showing how labels become observable definitions, why the unit of analysis has to be declared before coding starts, and what a second coder is for.

It also separates the five collection modes the handout names and says what each one can and cannot see.

Quantitative Research Methods and Analysis

Quantitative method gets two taught sessions, a practical session with statistical software and a further session on structural equation modelling.

The chapter ranks five comparison designs by what each can rule out, and makes the point that design strength is bought with access to a second group rather than with a more elaborate analysis.

It sets realistic expectations for scale, since published experiments in this field commonly run with twenty to thirty learners per condition, and it separates reliability from validity, description from association, and association from anything that could be called an effect.

AI Tools in Research Work and Academic Honesty

This course permits generative tools in assessment and attaches one condition: a statement detailing which tools were used, how far, and how they contributed, in the individual report and in the presentation slides alike.

The university's guidance asks that statement to name the tools, the purpose, the prompts entered and how the outputs were integrated.

The chapter walks the points of use where students misjudge the line, sets out how to cite generated content when it is the object of discussion, and treats the similarity limit as a writing instruction rather than a formatting one.

Writing the Research Proposal

The individual report is a research proposal of at least 1,800 words with eight required sections, and the marking sheet groups them into three items worth ten, forty and ten.

Five sections share the largest item and none of them is the introduction. The chapter maps sections onto marks, suggests how to spend the words, shows how a vague purpose statement is rewritten so that the methodology follows from it, and treats the timeline as a test of whether you understand your own design rather than as a formality.

Worked example · free

Turn a subject area into a statement of the problem

Key terms

Research Design

The set of decisions that connect a question to evidence capable of answering it: who is studied and how many, what is measured and with what, over what period, and against what comparison. It is distinct from method, which is the technique used inside that arrangement.

Statement of the Problem

The sentence that names a setting and population, the practical difficulty that makes the study worth doing, and the thing that is not yet known. It sits inside the introduction of the proposal and every later section answers to it.

Research Gap

A limitation that published work states about itself, such as a population barely studied or an outcome that has not been measured. A gap asserted from having found nothing is evidence about the search rather than about the field.

Capstone Project

The project route aimed at employment, whose central aim is putting knowledge that already exists together and applying it rather than producing knowledge nobody had before. Its deliverable is a workable instructional solution together with a report on it.

Coding Scheme

The document that lists the labels applied to qualitative data, defines each one by events an observer could see, fixes the unit that carries a label, and states how boundary cases are decided. It is what makes a second coder possible.

Unit of Analysis

The thing a single observation describes, such as a fixed time interval, a conversational turn or an individual learner. Counts from the same recording differ entirely depending on which unit was used, so it is declared before coding begins.

Quasi-experiment

A comparison between conditions in which participants were not allocated by chance, typically because existing classes were used. It is realistic in schools and transfers the work of ruling out selection from the design to the argument.

Learning Analytics

The collection, measurement and reporting of data generated by learners in digital systems, used to describe behaviour or to identify students who may need support. It supports description and prediction, not causal claims on its own.

Structural Equation Modelling

A family of statistical techniques that fits a network of relationships among measured and latent constructs at once. It needs considerably more respondents than a simple group comparison, which is the practical constraint in a one semester project.

Systematic Review

A review that states its search sources, its inclusion and exclusion criteria and its screening counts, so that a reader can judge what was left out. Published examples in this field retain a small fraction of what they retrieve.

Similarity Index

The percentage of a submitted text that matches sources in the checking service's database. The assignment requirements for this course ask students to keep it at or below fifteen per cent on the individual report.

Tool Use Declaration

The statement a student includes in submitted work naming which artificial intelligence tools were used, for what purpose, with which prompts, and how the outputs were integrated. It is required in the report and in the presentation slides.

INT6067 FAQ

Questions students ask in each INT6067 chapter

What is the difference between a research design and a research method?

Method is the technique used to gather or analyse evidence, such as an interview, a test before and after teaching, or a scheme for labelling recorded behaviour. Design is the arrangement those techniques sit in: who is compared with whom, in what order, over what period, and against what. Two studies using identical techniques can answer completely different questions because their arrangements differ, so naming a tradition or listing instruments does not tell a reader what your design is. Chapter 01 · Research and Research Design

Which route should I choose if I am not planning to do a doctorate?

Planning is not the only consideration, though it is a reasonable starting point, because the capstone route is described as preparation for employment and knowledge transfer in work related contexts. The stronger basis for choosing is which risk you can control. A capstone project has to work in front of users on a fixed day, and a partly finished system is worth very little on that day; a research project depends on somebody else granting access to participants, and losing that access late cannot be recovered by effort. Chapter 02 · Research Projects and Capstone Projects

How do I know whether my topic is narrow enough?

Test it by trying to describe data collection day in one sentence: who is in the room, what they do, what you record. A topic narrow enough to study produces that sentence immediately. One that does not is still a subject area, however specific the technology sounds. The other reliable test is whether you can name the person who would have to say yes, since a topic without a gatekeeper is a topic without a timeline. Chapter 03 · Finding a Topic and Framing the Problem

How many sources does a literature review for this course need?

No number is published, and chasing one is the wrong instinct, because the grade descriptors reward judicious use rather than volume. What a reader can check is whether the sources you cite are the ones your argument needs: the reviews that establish the current status, the primary studies whose designs you argue with, and the work that reports the limitation you are treating as your gap. A short list that does those three jobs reads as stronger than a long one that does none of them. Chapter 04 · Literature Review: Searching, Reading and Synthesis

How do we divide a fifteen minute talk between six people?

Divide it by component rather than by minutes, since the marks are allocated that way. One person takes the introduction and rationale, which is about a minute; the four components of the central item take roughly ten between them; conclusions and reflections take two. The cover page has to name the specific role and responsibility of each member anyway, so deciding the division is not optional preparation. All members are expected to contribute to the discussion, drafting and finalisation as well as to the delivery. Chapter 05 · Critically Reviewing a Journal Article

Can I report counts from coded data?

Yes, and describe them as what they are. A statement that one label appeared eighty-four times and another nineteen times in one class is a legitimate summary of your coding and carries every judgement the scheme built into it. What it is not is a statistical result, because there is no sampling behind it. A proposal that reports frequencies plainly reads as stronger than one that dresses them up, and a percentage with no sample behind it costs a reader's trust in the rest of the section. Chapter 06 · Qualitative Research and Methods

How many participants does my study need?

The honest answer in a proposal is that the number follows from the comparison rather than from a rule of thumb, and that published work in this field commonly runs with twenty to thirty learners per condition. What a marker looks for is consistency: a design promising to detect a small difference with two classes has promised something arithmetic will not deliver, and a design that names its limits explicitly reads as more competent than one that claims a sample it cannot recruit. Chapter 07 · Quantitative Research Methods and Analysis

Do I have to declare using a tool only to fix grammar?

Yes. The requirement is worded around which tools were used and how far, so the trigger is that a tool was used at all rather than how much it changed. A one sentence declaration naming the tool, the purpose, the prompt and what you did with the output satisfies it completely and takes a minute to write. Omitting it because the use felt trivial is the failure the instruction warns carries academic penalties. Chapter 08 · AI Tools in Research Work and Academic Honesty

What has to be in the methodology section?

The instruction names four things: the research design, the data sources, the data collection methods and the data analysis procedures. The fourth is the one most often missing from a draft, because students describe who will be studied and with what instrument and then stop, leaving a marker to guess what happens to the data. Two or three sentences fix it, and writing them also reveals whether the design collects enough to support the claim you intend to make. Chapter 09 · Writing the Research Proposal

How to prepare for the assessments

Carry one candidate topic of your own from the first week and answer every chapter's question about it before reading that chapter's answer. Then exploit the symmetry between the two assessed tasks: the group critique asks whether somebody else's literature, framing, method and findings hang together, and the proposal asks you to write those same four for a study that has not happened yet.

Preparing the talk in November is therefore the most efficient preparation available for the December report, provided you choose an article close to your own topic. The single highest return revision, once a draft exists, is to read the last sentence of your literature review against the first sentence of your purpose section and repair the thread if they name different things.

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