Guest blog post by Asma Karovalia, aakarova@uwaterloo.ca
My name is Asma Karovalia and I had the opportunity to be Diana’s co-op student and work with her as an Educational Research Assistant for four months. Diana and I both conducted a scoping review to help answer our research question: “what is known from existing literature about practices for educators to assess students in undergraduate STEM education?”
I study Psychology and Business at the University of Waterloo, so I was aware of some research methods and practices; however, conducting specific educational research was not something I had experience in. As a Psychology student looking into the world of assessments in the Faculty of Mathematics and a STEM-oriented world, I learned many things and gained insights. Before I talk more about my experience, I want to give a shoutout to Veronica Stephenson, who provided us with her time and resources on how to conduct scoping reviews and helped us jumpstart our research.
Before my work term began, while reflecting on what I hoped to accomplish in my four months, one of my goals was to uncover something new. Exploring educational literature and the breadth of research in this area has opened my eyes to how much more research in this field can be furthered. My experience these past four months reading various journal articles, extracting relevant data and information, and talking about the results has met the expectations I had for this position.
As mentioned earlier, we used a scoping review process for our research. I like that scoping reviews can be used to explore existing research in the literature that’s out there on a specific topic in a relatively short period of time – in our case, four months. Traditionally in scoping reviews, you are not supposed to critique the research you read, but we found ourselves automatically critiquing the articles we read. I will say though that we both found this valuable because we were able to think of potential future studies through this.
Based on the results, one of the coolest things I’ve learned about assessment is that there is no ‘one size fits all’. Despite our focus being on mathematics-related courses, there are many different parts and unique characteristics for each course. Thus, no one assessment is better or worse; each assessment has its own strengths and weaknesses. Another cool insight I realized from one of the papers we read is that the most important thing an instructor can and should do is ensure that their students understand the importance of the assessment they are using and how it can help them learn and improve. As a student myself, I can say that it does help when instructors are clear about their intent behind an assessment and how my learning can be developed. An instructor that places the quality of my education as the main focus and helps me understand the feedback they provide me is also really important.
Overall, I learned that research may seem like a daunting process at first, especially with how much one needs to accomplish in a short period of time, but also that it is about the journey – it is about the process of doing research. Of course, the final destination matters in the sense that you should aim to find results that help answer your initial research question or hypothesis, but another aspect that matters just as much are the small discoveries you make as you read new articles every day. These small insights may not be discussed in the final write-up of your research results; however, you carry these small insights with you in future research projects. For me, one of these small insights was realizing how much you can accomplish in a short period of time. I find it amazing that Diana and I were able to create something informative for instructors – but I also know that there is still more in this area of research that should be done. I am excited to see which direction this research project heads in the coming months.
Until then, thank you for reading about my experience. I truly learned so much these past four months and felt like a true researcher in the educational field.
