AEL 675 introduced me to the fundamentals of educational research, and it gave structure to a process I had previously approached only intuitively. Organized around the components of a research study, the course walked me through understanding educational research, writing a problem statement, conducting a literature review, selecting methods, and planning analysis. Although it sits outside my required technology sequence, it directly supports my degree goal of completing a dissertation and my professional goal of becoming a productive researcher.
The three major assignments built cumulatively and taught me a great deal. Drafting a problem statement forced me to articulate a researchable problem clearly and to justify why it mattered, moving me beyond vague topic interest toward a focused inquiry. The literature review assignment strengthened my ability to locate, synthesize, and organize scholarship around a problem rather than merely summarizing individual studies, a skill I now use constantly in my Graduate Research Assistant work. The analysis-plan assignment then pushed me to think ahead about how data would actually be examined, helping me appreciate that method and analysis must be planned in alignment with the research questions from the outset.
What I valued most was how the course demystified the architecture of a study, showing how problem, literature, method, and analysis connect into a coherent whole. This structural understanding has made me a more disciplined thinker about my own emerging research on emerging-technology integration in STEM and higher education, and it laid essential groundwork for the more specialized qualitative-research courses I would take afterward. AEL 675 gave me the vocabulary and the scaffolding to design research intentionally rather than by instinct, which is exactly what I will need as I advance toward my dissertation.
