D-Personal Progress Dissertation Information

EDCO 716

Personal Progress: Dissertation Information Assignment Instructions

Overview

The student will complete 8 Personal Progress Assignments in this course. These reports will be submitted as a discussion within the course, providing students with an opportunity to collaborate on ideas and share resources related to dissertation topic interests. Discussion replies are OPTIONAL. For each assignment, students must support their assertions with scholarly citations in current APA format where appropriate. Each assignment must be between 200 to 250 words.

Instructions

After you review the online course materials for all the weeks up to and including this assignment, you will create an extensive post that covers all of the following:

Career Goals Related to Teaching: Your career goal(s) for teaching directly relate to the types of study designs you should consider for your dissertation. For example, if you want to be a full-time professor in a university setting, you will want to develop a dissertation that has a very good chance of being published. If you see yourself teaching only part time as an adjunct instructor for a university or not at all, then other designs that are less publishable are also an option.

Research Topic: You do not have to have your specific research questions and hypotheses developed at this point. A brief paragraph describing the general topic area and some ideas you have about what to investigate will be sufficient. Conversations and email communication with your course instructor can be very helpful in figuring this out. Research Approach and Sampling Strategy: In the research approach and sampling section, you clarify whether you are planning to do a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed design study.

Research Pool Identification: It is important to select a topic in an area of expertise for Liberty University faculty and adjuncts. To help with this, the EdD program has created research pools. A research pool is a group of Liberty University professors and/or adjuncts who have the expertise in a broad subject area. They can supervise your dissertation as the chair or sit as a reader on your committee as long as it fits that broad area. In the research approach and sampling section, you clarify whether you are planning to do a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed design study.

For this stage in the dissertation process, the research pools are mentioned more so just to get you thinking about what area your research falls under. For example, is it trauma? Or it under marriage/divorce? Is it related to pastoral ministry? Etc. Here's the full list of pools for our program: 

· Clergy Resilience/Self Care

· Faith-based/Spiritual/Integration Topics

· Bereavement/Grief

· Pastoral Counseling

· Marriage and Family Issues/Parenting

· Addictions

· Human Sexuality

· Trauma/PTSD

· Applied Therapy

· Eating Disorder

· Special Populations (ie refugees, immigrants, human trafficking)

You might have a study that falls under more than one research pool. This basically just gets you ahead thinking about professors and resources that are available as you move forward in the process. When you tag your research proposal for the department at another stage, it will alert faculty that are part of that pool for their consideration. It becomes more relevant later on, not so much for this course. Here it's just a preliminary consideration.