Connecting Theory to Practice: Making Research Real for Graduate Students

Introduction

There is an expectation and a need stated by Wendler et al. (2012) that in order for any country – or any organization or person, for that matter – to take a place of leadership, the development of human talent must be cultivated. Labor forces need innovation and talent and a significant amount of that talent is prepared in our educational institutions. Higher education prepares scores of future productive members of various economies: information economies, financial economies, labor economies, knowledge economies at both the undergraduate and graduate level. However, if student experiences are not positive in graduate school, and if that student leaves before obtaining a degree and fully developing his or her advanced research skills, both innovation and the economy will suffer a loss.

If there is one consistent message that is sent loud and clear to K-12 students and our communities, it is the promise of a secure future – if you have a degree. As students move throughout the educational process there is continual pressure to work toward a post-high school degree. Then, as they receive their bachelor’s degree, there may be even more encouragement from those around them to consider advancing to an advanced degree such as a master’s degree or even a doctorate.

At some point in that progression through higher education it is expected that students will complete at least one research project, usually embedded in an introductory research methods or statistics course. At the authors’ institutions, for example, students in many (but not all) disciplines are exposed to the research process in a required third-year statistics, research methods, or analysis course. These undergraduate courses introduce basic concepts and processes for conducting research yet, in our experience, the students often stop short of actually completing a project. The assignment often requires only a proposal and shallow literature review without any independent inquiry or analysis.

Faculty in graduate programs may assume that students who had this slight introduction are prepared for the rigors of scholarly research. Even required introductory graduate courses such as Introduction to Research or Statistics carry the assumption that students have some prior knowledge of this information. As is common throughout the education system, instructors at advanced levels hope that the students learned a particular set of skills at an earlier level; this hope becomes an assumption that allows the instructor to skip the basics and drive right into advanced methods. After all, why should I have to teach a graduate student how to conduct independent research? Or how to write? Or how to effectively search a library database? The students should have acquired those skills before they entered graduate school.

Yet acquiring discrete baseline skills and then being able to transfer those skills to conducting an independent research project is a significant cognitive leap, one that requires mentoring and deliberate instructional interventions to navigate successfully. Unfortunately, graduate programs do not always include enough time to develop and transfer those advanced skills. Long and Schonfeld (2014) noted that in the discipline of art history “techniques needed to conduct original research are sometimes taught in courses about theory, but in some graduate programs they do not have a major role in the curriculum” (p. 39), even though those professions often require practical research skills. Graduate students might receive an introductory course in a specific methodology, such as a discrete analysis or multiple regression, but the holistic process is missing.