Timeline

Academic Year 2003-2004

Reaffirmation, Collaboration and Goal-Setting



Fall 2003

Based on the goals chosen in the Spring of 2003 and because the large leadership team continued to hold up decision-making, we re-organized into the smaller sub-committees by the end of the Fall 2003 semester. Below you will see a flow chart representing this reorganization. All of the members of the leadership team, both faculty and students could choose the committee on which to serve. Many of the faculty felt particularly strongly about developing an alternative research preparation model, whereas the students were particularly concerned with exploring mentoring and the qualifying exam. Strong leadership from international students on the committee also emerged who focused on assessing the needs of this population.

Larger View of Flow Chart

Sucesses and Failures

Those groups which had strong support from the graduate students grew into more distinct reform initiatives. Indeed, in each case they led to directed inquiry and (although in some cases still emerging) policy recomendation and/or model development. Key in these efforts were the informal conversations that CID graduate students and faculty initiated with their colleagues about current mentoring and qualifying exam processes. Likewise, the international students' needs sub-committee benefited from cooperation with the School of Education's standing committee on international programs. This provided the groundwork for our later collaboration with Ohio State University and Arizona State University.

The other sub-committees failed to reach their goals during this phase of the project. Two members of the subcomittee on the alternative research preparation simulataneously participated in the development of a new Ph.D. degree in the Learning Sciences, where some of the ideas were translated into a new interdisciplinary degree with emphasis on research apprenticeships and collaborative research projects. This in particular changed the sub-committee structure during the Spring semester, but also ultimately provided a very tangible way of seeing some of our ideas implemented since this was a newly created program. The December 2003 update report, to which there is a link below, reflects our attempt to support the activities of the subcommittee even though it overstretched our resources . Ultimately, we had to develop a different means of achieving the leadership team's goals.

December 2003 Summary of CID Activities

Challenges

As mentioned above, a lack of resources --particularly time--and clearly defined goals contributed to certain sub-committees failing to make progress. This itself can be attributed to a dearth of easily accessible data on doctoral students within the School of Education. Particularly for the alternative research model sub-group, relatively simple questions such as: what is the enrollment in quantiataive versus qualitative courses, were difficult to answer. The group also realised that a new model could only become a reality for an individual or a small program and would not be useful as a general model. It is particularly interesting that all of the professors involved in the process, in addition to the a majority of the graduate students, agreed that the current preparation model was inadequate. Indeed, during this academic year the entire leadership team identified "Promotion of a Culture of Inquiry" as the most important goal of the reform policy. We concluded that serious time needed to be devoted to data collection and analysis in order to have evidence about deficiencies and problems in our doctoral programs before we could restart a discussion of a more realistic model for research preparation.


Spring 2004

Work in the sub-committees outlined above continued with the intent of working towards the goals outlined in December 2003. By the end of this semester, 3 sub-committees, M.S.--> Ph.D. transitions, First-year student experience, and Exploring the differences between Ed.D. and Ph.D., decided they would no longer continue. The first of these sub-committees decided that the conversation needed to be continued in certain departments where master's degrees would be reconceived as prerequisites to the Ph.D. program. The second subcommittee died for lack of interest. The decision, however, to discontinue the Ed.D. versus Ph.D sub-committee was more political in nature. This is discussed in the section on challenges below.


Successes and Failures

1. We were able to continue our collaboration with Ohio State University utilizing videoconfernencing technology. This was critical for us to then develop, in the Summer of 2004, a more cohesive joint project on international student needs. The Qualifying Exam and Mentoring Subcommittes conducted surveys and presented findings at AERA. We feel this public domain to our work is particularly important in terms of impact on the field and as a way of supporting graduate students who contribute to the reform process. In each case graduate students designed and conducted the research presented. For more information on these groups' work please click the links below.

2. While the inquiry aspects of the above named projects were successful, translating the results into policy recomendation has proven more difficult. In some regards the information has fed into other projects, such as the research model and mentoring award, but in others difinitive policies have been diffciult because the results often reveal distinct differences in practice between the five departments and seventeen program areas.

Evidence Snapshot: Mentoring

Innovation: Mentoring Award

Evidence Snapshot: Understanding the Qualifying Exam

Challenges

The topic of the Ed.D. versus the Ph.D. is one that has drawn attention nationally. Many of the schools of education which have undertaken the most dramatic reform, have begun by clearly defining the different purposes of these two doctoral degrees. We also identified this as a potentially important aspect. The sub-committee gathered information on the policies which designate the degrees here and held a public forum, at which students in Ed.D. programs and professors holding Ed.Ds were invited to share their views. The summary of this forum is attached below and reveals differing views on the topic, but a general reticence to call the Ed.D. a different doctoral degree, e.g. to make clearer distinctions in purpose, is revealed. Below we have provided a summary of the initial discussions and minutes from the forum. In the end we decided that there was no momentum at this time to pursue a greater differentiation of the two degrees. We talked with faculty from our Educational Leadership program, who only offer an Ed.D., to hold discussions about research requirements which they have now started. From that point on our CID projects only focused on Ph.D. reform.

Discussions from Ed.D. Ph.D. Sub-committee

Ed.D. and Ph.D. Policy Differences

Summary of Ed.D. Ph.D. forum



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