Research Methods (EDUC 490) was the first course I took at Santa Clara University in this MA-IDE program, in the Fall 2014 quarter, with professor Angelo Collins. This course set the stage for transitioning from the Bachelor’s degree to the Master’s degree in a couple ways. At the master’s level, Professor Collins explained, we would be consuming, analyzing, and synthesizing much more research than we did as undergraduates in college. In this class, we learned about the types of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed- research methods, such as experiments, surveys, case studies, etc., and their strengths and weaknesses. Having this knowledge helped a great deal when it came to interpreting and evaluating research studies and articles, which was a large component in preparing to write our literature reviews. I felt that the course adequately prepared me for the research I would be engaging with in concurrent and subsequent courses as well.

The final product, the Literature Review, was an excellent writing experience for me. We were encouraged to chose topics that we cared deeply about, so I chose to focus on developmental mathematics in community colleges: are these courses and programs effective? What factors affect student success in remedial mathematics? Finally, what are some of the best practices, instructional methods, or course formats? My work at the Carnegie Foundation has been centered on developmental mathematics – we have two “Pathways” courses aimed at accelerating the time it takes for developmental students to complete a college level math course. I had been working on the contextualized curricula in quantitative reasoning and statistics for two and a half years, but this was an opportunity to examine the roots of the problems and what is being done to address them, taking a more sophisticated, critical look at the issues at the heart of my work.

It was also a good writing experience as it pushed me out of my comfort zone. I enjoy reading fiction and creative writing quite a bit, so the level of academic writing for a literature review was new to me. It was a good learning opportunity for me to research and synthesize information about developmental mathematics from an analytic standpoint, whereas at Carnegie, I had mainly focused on writing the curriculum itself.

The course and the final literature review addressed two of the Lumina Foundation's main M.A. Degree Qualifications. The first is an expectation within specialized knowledge: in this paper, I articulated a wide range of challenges that exist within community college education, and extensively researched and drew inferences from a large set of research articles on theories, current knowledge, and practices in developmental mathematics. Second, this Research Methods course also placed emphasis on the intellectual skill use of information sources. We learned how to find, read, evaluate, summarize, and properly cite articles from research journals.