MED 900: You are Required to Identify a Research Problem (or Research Topic) in Psychology: Educational Inquiry Assignment, NTU, Singapore

Your Task

In this assignment, you are required to identify a research problem (or research topic) in psychology or/and education area that you have encountered in the educational research literature and/or your own professional experience. Further, you need to develop a research proposal that describes an appropriate research method for the problem.

You will not need to actually execute this study, but rather submit a convincing proposal that could realistically address the research problem you have chosen. This means that you will need to include a literature review, identify a research gap, describe your research problem and research question(s), and offer a detailed description of your methodology (e.g. data collection and analysis).

Your research proposal can be either a qualitative or quantitative research design (or a mixed-methods approach). You should choose your design based on whether it is the most appropriate method of educational inquiry, given your research problem. Furthermore, try to make the scope of your proposed research design reasonable, e.g. this should be a study you could potentially complete whether in your careers or here at university, so, you should have a realistic time frame, number of participants, intervention(s), instruments, etc.

Some examples of potential projects include:

• Is pedagogy A more effective than pedagogy B?
• Does variable A influence variable B?
• Does learning features A, B, or C differ across classes?
• What is the effect of Variable A on Variable B (e.g. extensive reading time on vocabulary)?
• How does motivation/self-perception/teacher feedback/ICT relate to academic performance?
• Why do students in cohort A perform differently than cohort B on test C?
• How can problem A be improved in my class/school?
• How does student A experience a particular aspect/context of education?