May 31st Class (Please post your reflections and questions under this topic)

Dear All,

I just uploaded today's PPT and tomorrow's readings in Baidu Pan. Feel free to download them. Also, Hope today's lecture of statistics did not discourage you from doing more quantitative studies. Just like what Peter said in the class, a good way to acquire the statistics knowledge is by conducting a quantitative study. So, you will get there. No worries. .

The book I mentioned today is this one:

The fourth edition of Discovering Statistics using SPSS.
Field, A. P. (2013). Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS Statistics: and sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll (fourth edition). London: Sage publications.


Best,
Wendy

In today’s class, the analysis of research was very useful and we could learn a lot about the procedures of how to write a thesis. Through the analysis of others’ thesis, we can imitate the writing styles and research methods, which is very important for beginners. Through the discussion with classmates, we can also learned a lot. However, I was not very clear about the data analysis. I was confused aout how these parameters were calculated and what they mean. May be the professor can slow down the speed and state in detail about the methods of data analysis. May be sometimes it is better to explain some complex terms in Chinese.
Question: Since there are many kinds of data analysis methods, how do we choose the most suitable one when doing research?

The explanation at the beginning helps me to know more about some basic research problems.
Today I learn about the structure of introduction and literature review.
By learning a quantitative paper, I get to know something about statistics analysis like p-value, t-test, etc.
I also learn about the differences between the "between group" and "within group" study.
I think today's statistic material is a little complicated that I feel hard to understand some of the process. Anyway, I still learn a lot about quantitative studies.

Question: As a beginner in pedagogical research, is there any suggestion for selecting research topics?
Thanks,
Doris  

Reflection:
I felt quiet confused during today’s lecture owing to the analysis of data, which not only requires the knowledge of Mathematics, but logical thinking. However, the benefits outweigh the confusion. I’ve got new ideas of ways to design the research, including T-test and ANOVA. After the collection of data, it is necessary to do data cleaning, which means only correct answers are included and those outliers should be excluded. Through group work, I had better understanding about the essential elements in writing introduction, literature review.

Question:
If one is going to conduct a research on non-English majors regarding one of their L2 competences, is it necessary to divide the participants into two groups as majors of arts and science since their thinking and learning patterns may differ from each other?

Class 2
Reflection
Today’s class was so beneficial and also of course difficult for us to follow cause we are all beginners in the field of statistic analysis so maybe we need more introduction and detailed guidance. And it’s helpful for Wendy to recommend such a book to us.

And I’d like to say that the process of analyzing the article of Nan Jiang was very instructive for us to understand the whole logic of writing such a experimental research. I know more about how to connect background information, literature review, hypothesis and experiment step by step coherently, which build a model for us.

And there is one more thing I’d like to mention is the Q&A process before class. In Q&A, I also get some implications from my classmates.

Question
In a experimental research, there should be background, introduction and research hypothesis/question part followed by experiment part. But in the article we talked about in class today doesn’t have such subtitles, is that formal?
Does this article lack a sufficient theoretical basis? Thank you!

Dear Peter,
For today's lesson, first we addressed problems like “If the research findings contradict with the hypothesis, what would you do?” Professor Han expressed his opinion that sometimes theories do have exceptions, and doubts are allowed when we carry out our studies.Then we we formed six groups to discuss the paper“The Processing of Formulaic Sequences by Second Language Speakers”(Jiang & Nekrasova, 2007). We tried to look into it in detail and tying to analyze the key factors that should be covered in the introduction part and literature review part. Wendy and Professor Han explained to us the research methods, data, and tables analyses covered experiment 1. It’s sort of difficult and challenging, but Professor Han and Wendy tried their best to make them intellegeable, which I really appreciate.

Question: What are basic factors that we need to take into consideration if we want to carry out a quantitative study? For example, "How to decide the number of paticipants or testing items?"
Best,
Evelyn Lu (陆义莹)

Reflections on 2rd class
My fellow classmates had brought about many intelligent questions,by answering these questions Peter helped us refreshing our memory and gave some extra information that hadn’t been touched upon last class.
In close reading Jiang and Nekrasova’s article about formulaic sequences, we have a better understanding about the guidelines for experimental research, including the introduction,literature review and so on. Then the data analysis part is quite beyond us,since all of us have no practical experience. It would be better if you introduce the basic concepts before the article reading, or give us related materials to read before class.
Question: Many of us were puzzled about the data analysis part, so could you possibly explain these concepts and like t-test, general linear model, and ANOVA in detail

Reflections: First and for most, I do appreciate the Q&A session at the beginning of the lecture, which was not only to answer the puzzles posed by the students but also an overview of the last lecture. However, it took a long time for some unrelated questions. And then, we analyzed the beginning part of a paper, including introduction and literature review with the guidelines provided by Peter. Indeed, it was a good form to discuss in groups. Also I knew that while writing literature review, we should clearly present the previous researches, but it was not enough. The strengths and drawbacks should also be pointed out straightforwardly, which was known as research gap. After that, Wendy explained a quantitive research by citing the terms and statistics in two experiments in the paper. The knowledge of the terms was the fundamental part for conducting a research. Of course, we as graduates have such kind of knowledge. However, the reading material selected by Peter, especially the variables in the experiment were a little difficult for us beginners. So after-class self learning was very necessary.
Question: Is it necessary to involve both participant analysis and item analysis on the experiment1 shown in the paper? How does item analysis relate to the final findings? Thank you very much.

We started with the part of problem-solving, from which I obtained lots of beneficial answers. Then we set about analyzing the article in detail. We worked in group to analyzing the article’s introduction part and literature review part and this kind of group discussion, in my opinion contributes to our understanding of the article and our critical thinking. Then we came to a difficult part: using ANOVA to process the data, which still gave me a headache after the explanation by the teacher.
Question: How we deal with a large number of the data in research? Could we be introduced in detail about this ?

Reflections:
I have to say today's class is really informative and I feel quite overwhelmed. At the beginning of the class, it is the problem-solving part. Peter and other three teachers have shared their solutions and ideas about the problems we have put forward, which is quite beneficial to our doing research and writing research papers. Then we come to the second part of this class-analyzing the structure of an reserach paper. It reminds me of the chinese class in our high school. What i have learned is that as long as we are writing, whether in Chinese or English, it is necessary for us to learn the structure of an article in advance, so it is with writing dissertation. Perhaps each article will have its own framework, but they will to some degree share a similar pattern, that is what I learn from this class. Next, we move to the third part-data analysis. In this process, I have learnt many terms like ANOVA, p-value, participant analysis and item analysis, etc.. Though there are still many points that i haven't understood, the teacher says if you want to figure out what is quantitative study, you must do it yourself. So I just keep learning and carry on~~
Question:
When processing the data, are there any other methods except ANOVA? Is it an indispensable method in processing data?

From today’s lecture, I learned a lot more about how to write the different parts of an experimental article. And when we read previous researches, we should pay attention to the methods and proceduresused before, from which we can get enlightenments in our own studies. For the data analyzing part, we should make every piece of analysis serve to the discussion part.
Question:
In this article, the author asks the participants each responds to one of the two test lists and their assignments are random. Why the author design two counterbanlanced test lists? One test list is not enough?

Reflection for the 2rd day
I really benefit a lot from today’s class. Though toady’s materials is a very tough stuff to deal with, some ideas come to my mind and they may become a good tool when considering writing my own thesis.
1. Thesis writing should follow one or several good models so as to get a better structure.
2. Innovation is a crucial point in thesis writing. And it can also be illustrated in some minor points,for example, the way of presenting data can be innovative.
3. Literature review for a thesis should include those old studies and new studies.catching up with the new trend is important,but old studies can also give us some inspirations in that the study area of a certain period of time is different.
Qs: Wendy mentioned that within groups ANOVA is similar to paired-test. Are they only different in the number of groups, i.e, more than two and two?

Refection:
Today we analyzed a thesis in the class, which benefited me a lot. Thanks to the guideline, we can read the thesis in a logical way and fine out the information in different section. So I believe that such kind of sample thesis may lead us to a clearer mode of thesis writing. But some point may be confused according to the lecture and students’ question, so I wander if the questions can be put after each section of the lecture, or else whether the time and schedule will be disturbed.

Question:
I knew that T-test is a kind of method of data analyzing in the field of applied linguistics, I want to know the difference among One-Sample T Test, Paired-Sample T Test and Independent T Test. Is there any relationship or similarities with today’s lecture?

Dear Peter,

I met some difficulties today, especially in understanding those unfamiliar methodologies to deal with data. It will be easier for me to understand if you can clearly show us which number in which part shows which result because there is a lot of calculation in this mixed methods research.

My question is that not like many theses I have ready before, the thesis mentioned today does not have subtitles like “introduction”, “research questions” and “methodology”. So in my thesis, is it necessary to cover those subtitles to make my thesis clear?

Best,
Lucy.

In the class, the group work and the discussion session is a good way to let us learn from others' thesis about how to write the introduction and literature review parts, so that we can pay more attention to the writing contents in our own thesis in the near future.But the second session is a little bit difficult for me to understand, especially when it comes to the experiments, data collection and analysis, partly because I have covered too little knowledge about quanatative research.
So, I want to know if there is any books or articles related to data collection and analysis that can be recommended to us, especially for beginners of quanatative research?

In the class, the group work and the discussion session is a good way to let us learn from others' thesis about how to write the introduction and literature review parts, so that we can pay more attention to the writing contents in our own thesis in the near future.But the second session is a little bit difficult for me to understand, especially when it comes to the experiments, data collection and analysis, partly because I have covered too little knowledge about quanatative research.
So, I want to know if there is any books or articles related to data collection and analysis that can be recommended to us, especially for beginners of quanatative research?

Hey, Peter!
I have submitted reflection everyday, but it is so strange because several relections hav not been submitted to this forum successfully. Maybe there's some problem with the network. But never mind, I have these contents in my WORD, I need to submit them again.
The articles we have learned today is a little difficult, which concerned with quantitative study. Since we haven't set about making quantitative research, so we may be a little confused when we encounter the complex statistics.
So, a little suggestion: maybe next time, we can have some articles that is more easier for us to understand.
Good night!