The University of Manchester Manchester Institute of Education

EDUC70102 Developing Researcher Competence

(Main Tutors: Richard Fay and Paul Smith)

The DRC Two-Part Assignment

Research Plan Deadline: Tuesday 14th March before 2.00pm.

Reflection Assignment Deadline: Wednesday 3rd May before 2.00pm
Assignment Part 2 Deadline: Tuesday 17th May before 2.00pm
Dissertation Plan Deadline: to be confirmed (with Zeynep)

Overview
This module, DRC for short, provides you with:
i. an experience of being a researcher, i.e. you undertake a carefully scaffolded Pilot Study which
you report in the larger part of the assignment (worth 70%) which you submit last; and
ii. a structured process of reflection on this experience which forms the basis of the smaller
Reflection part of the assignment (worth 30%) which you submit first.

Additionally, as part of the Pilot Study (DRC Experience), you will submit a Research Plan. This carries
no formal assessment but it is a necessary step in the process (enabling us to ‘sign off’ on your
proposal, i.e. approve your plan) where we provide feedback on your progress.

The topic you choose for your Pilot Study is one we hope you will continue with for your Dissertation.
Therefore, the insights you gain into this topic through the DRC Experience will be invaluable for your
Dissertation. The DRC Experience is an empirical endeavour, and your Dissertation might also be
empirically-oriented. If so, the DRC Research Report will provide you with a good sense of what your
dissertation might look like (suitably enlarged of course).

But, please note that your Dissertation could also be more practically-oriented, in which case the
Principled Course and Materials Design (PMCD) module may provide a useful sense of what the
Dissertation will be like. And your Dissertation could also be more conceptually-oriented (although
this is much less common). It might even be Action Research oriented (although this is challenging in
the timeframe available for full-time students).

Given these different Dissertation orientations, you will also be creating a Dissertation Plan to
structure your work with your Dissertation Supervisor. The Dissertation Plan carries no assessment
weighting but it is an important step for you in making sense of the Semester 2 experiences (of DRC
and perhaps PMCD) and how these inform your Dissertation thinking.

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Research Plan
By Step 5 in the DRC process, you should be able to produce a Research Plan which provides an
overview of what you are proposing to do in your Pilot Study. This plan will include:

 a statement of purpose for your topic (e.g. “In this small-scale Pilot Study, I want to explore …)”;
 a brief, informing discussion of the literature relevant to your topic;
 your Research Question …. just ONE question, as presented in question format … and this RQ
should be informed by that literature, by your context and your hunches about it, by the
research methodology literature, and by the small-scale scope of a Pilot Study;
 your chosen research approach /methodology / method …. just ONE method (as informed by
the input sessions on the module, by the supplementary self-study distance learning materials,
and by the relevant research methodology literature); and
 your consideration of ethical matters.

Research Report (submitted last) (approx. 4,500 words)

Part 1 consists of a Research Report on the Pilot Study you undertook through the DRC Experience. 1
Although you will be practising the Research Report genre of writing, the purpose of this part of the
assignment lies with your developing researcher competence (as based on the DRC Experience / Pilot
Study) rather than on providing a report on a perfectly-conducted piece of research.

The report should have its own heading (of your own devising), and an Abstract (approx. 300 words)
detailing the research aim, research question, research methodology, and the findings of the study. It
should start with an introduction to the Pilot Study in which you signpost the purpose and structure
of the report which follows. Then, as informed by personal, professional and literature-based
understandings, you will contextualise and conceptualise the study for your readers, culminating in a
statement of the research aim and the related research question (singular!).2 By page 3 (in 1.5 or
double-line spacing) - at the latest – you should be talking about research design, methodology and
so on, i.e. keep the introductory, signposting paragraphs succinct.

This brief Introduction will be followed by detailed discussion of your research methodology
including the design of your data generation/collection tool, the generation/collection of your data, 3
and the processing and analysis of that data.4 Note that some of the products of your research
activity (e.g. the questionnaires used, and the prompts used in structured interviews) can, and often
should, appear in the Appendices. In all parts, you should aim to be as transparent as possible
about what you did, thereby allowing a reader to gain a clear and detailed picture of your Pilot
Study. The Report should then present your findings, i.e. with your ‘answers’ to your Research
1
Although the report is of the DRC Experience, and although that experience was scaffolded by the 10-step
model, the report itself should conform to the genre of research reports (which you will have encountered in
your reading etc). Therefore, the report should NOT be explicitly framed around the 10-step model.
2
We suggest that, assuming you use 1.5 line-spacing, you provide no more than a single page for literature-
informed positioning of your topic … in fact, this positioning can sometimes be combined with introduction
where personal starting point, research aim, hunches and overall organisation of the Report is covered. Double
check that the actual research question (with a question mark at the end) is included here (in this positioning
section) or in the research methodology section which follows.
3
Make sure to include a discussion of a) the design/planning the data generation/collection, and b) what
happened ‘in the field’ as you operationalised this plan.
4
Make sure to include a discussion of HOW the data was processed and analysed.
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Question. You may include brief discussion of any other (perhaps unexpected) insights that emerged
from your study.5 You should provide a final conclusion in which you discuss: a) how far the research
methods managed to generate an answer to the research question; and b) what are the main
contributions of the research (can include contributions to personal research trajectory - e.g. moving
to dissertation). In addition to any Appendices6 - you should also provide a list of References used in
the report.7

Alongside describing what you did (using the above suggested structure), you need to incorporate a
rationale for what you did into all parts of the report.8 This begins with a justification for your choice
of research aim and research question (singular!). The relevance of any references to personal,
professional and literature-based starting points should be clear. You need to justify: a) the selection
and design of a data generation/collection tool; b) the procedures you followed in generating/
collecting data; and c) how you processed, presented, analysed, and interpreted your data. This will
require making appropriate references to both research methods and relevant TESOL literature.
Overall, the reader should gain a clear sense of your recognition of the strengths and limitations of
your research methodology, and a clear sense of how effective your Pilot Study has been in
achieving the research aim and ‘answering’ the research question.

Where appropriate, the report should take a reflexive stance. The exact interpretation (and form of
reflexivity) adopted by your report will depend on the type of study you have undertaken. At its
simplest, reflexivity may be more central in a Pilot Study that generates qualitative data, adopts a
relativist stance, adopts an insider perspective, and/or relies on interpretive means for data analysis.
Reflexivity may still play a part, but perhaps less so, when your study is quantitative, you are an
outsider to the research context, and/or when you adopt a positivist stance.

Reflection (on your researcher development) (submitted first) (approx. 2,000 words)
The Reflection part of assignment is where you focus on your DRC insights as gained through
reflection on the DRC Experience / Pilot Study.

During each of the ten steps of your DRC experience, you should have kept a Research(er) Journal.
These capture what can be understood as your reflection-in-action moving towards your reflection-
on-action. At the end of the research process, you should use the reflective entries in this journal to
critically reflect on the progress and process of your research, and on your experience of being the
researcher conducting the study. This at-the-end-of-the-study reflection represents reflection-on-
action moving towards reflection-for-action. If you opt for an empirically-oriented dissertation, you
will need to reflect on what all of this experience means for your upcoming researcher practice (i.e.
Dissertation-focused reflection-for-action).

5
Results, findings and interpretation/discussion may be combined differently depending on the nature of
individual projects.
6
You may want to give, as appendices, your Participant Information and Informed Consent Sheets and your
data-generation ‘instruments’ for example.
7
As a rule-of-thumb, for this assignment, 80-90% of references should be from research methodology
literature (but note some of you may wish to use the subject-focused literature as a source for research
methods ideas/advice).
8
In this way, as analogous to being a principled course designer (for the PMCD module), we are encouraging
you to be a principled researcher (in DRC).
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Using these forms of reflection as a kind of data, for the Reflection part of the assignment you need
to critically discuss:

a) what you have learned about the research process (e.g. what parts of the process you found
most challenging); and,
b) what your ongoing priorities are in terms of further developing your researcher competence.

This critical reflection may benefit greatly from making reference to, and quoting from, your own
Research(er) Journal, i.e. the reflective data. The critical reflection is likely to be written in a personal
voice, but may also benefit from some carefully chosen references to the research method literature.

For this Reflection part of the assignment, we emphasise that you should be stubbornly focusing on
your developing researcher competence. This can be achieved in different ways. Organising the
reflections according to the 10- steps of the DRC Experience may seem like a safe way, but a more
creative (and often more effective) option would be to focus on three or four areas of developing
researcher competence.

The Reflection part of the assignment may include relatively few references to literature - but some
might still be helpful, e.g. the Borg article on research journals, the Stelma & Fay article on
intentionality, and so on.

Notes:
o Please provide a word count for each part of the assignment.
o You are allowed to go 10% above/below the total indicated word count.
o The 300 word Abstract (for the Report) is NOT included in the word count.
o The References list and any Appendices ) are NOT included in the word count.
o In preparation for your Dissertation, the assignment (and especially the Research Report) should
conform to Dissertation requirements in terms of presentation, quotations, referencing, and
other academic conventions.

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An Example
Research Report Title:
?? [indication of the topic]: A Research Report on a Pilot Study

Abstract (300 words max):

Introduction:
In this part of the assignment, I report on a small-scale Pilot Study undertaken as part of my MA
TESOL studies as preparatory for the dissertation. The development and conduct of this Pilot Study
was structured by the 10-step model (+ ref) on which the developing researcher competence module
was based but this report, whilst based on that 10-step process, is organised in the form of a
research report consisting of the following sections:

1.1 Introduction including Research Questions (as informed by the work for Steps 1 and 3)

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The University of Manchester Manchester Institute of Education
1.2 Literature Review/Discussion (as informed by the work for Step 2 but intentionally kept minimal
thereby leaving space throughout the assignment for a discussion of the research methodology
literature to show how your researcher thinking is informed)
1.3 Methodology (as informed by the work for Steps 4, 5, 6, and 7)
1.4 Analysis and Interpretation (as informed by the work for Steps 8 and 9)
1.5 Concluding Comments (as related to Step 10).

….. [main body of the assignment]

References (mainly for works on research methodology rather than topic)

Appendices (as relevant)

Reflection Title:
Reflections on My Developing Researcher Competence

Introduction:
In this part of the assignment, as informed by the work of Schon (+ refs) and others on reflective
process in professional development, I present my end-of-process analysis of (i.e. reflections on) my
reflections made during the Pilot Study Process. I do so in order to capture and articulate what I have
learned about being a researcher and to consider the implications of such learning for me as a
developing researcher. In particular, throughout the DRC experience I maintained a Researcher
Journal. Thus, for each of the 10-steps of the model of developing researcher competence (+ ref)
used to structure the DRC experience, as exemplified in Appendix ?, I reflected on the experience of
the step concerned. In this way, I generated a corpus of reflection-in-action data which I
subsequently (i.e. at the end of the DRC experience) analysed. It is this analysis and the results of it
which I now present. My discussion is organised around the main insights I have developed regarding
research and being a researcher and for each area of insight, I use extracts from the corpus of
reflective data to exemplify the insight, and its genesis and development during the DRC experience.

2.1 My Process of Reflection

2.2 The Analysis of My Researcher Journal
2.3 Main Insights Regarding My DRC
2.4 Implications for My Future Research Practice
2.5 Concluding Comments

….. [main body of the assignment]

References
Appendices

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EDUC70102 DRC 2022-23
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