T H E M A S T E R S P A P E R MIT -- WINTER 2009 TO WINTER 2010The master’s paper provides you an opportunity to both learn and demonstrate your skill in informing your practice as a teacher. By now you have all identified a question that you’d like to investigate which could be relevant to your first year of teaching. You have also all learned strategies for finding relevant research articles to inform your question. Over the next two quarters independent research, you will learn about theissues and history surrounding your question through independent research. You will also learn how to critically read and draw meaningful conclusions from research articles by learning both about some qualitative and quantitative research methods, and how to read and make sense of some inferential statistics.Time line for completing project and receiving feedback from faculty:- Over the next two quarters, you will each develop good working drafts of the first three chapters of the paper: (i) the introduction (outline due week 5, draft due week 10), (ii) the history (outline due week10, draft due spring quarter week 3), and (iii) the critical review of the literature (drafts due throughout winter and spring quarter). - The faculty will give you feedback on each of these three chapters before you go on summer break. - Using that feedback, you write a complete draft of all four chapters of the master’s paper by the week before student teaching starts in August 2009. Important to note: You will not be allowed to proceed with student teaching without first handing in a complete draft by this date.- The faculty will read through your complete drafts and provide the next round of feedback at the end of your Fall student teaching.- You will have six weeks after student teaching in which to use the feedback to revise the final draft of your paper.- You will submit that final, appropriately formatted draft on the first day of the Winter Quarter 2010. You will need to work on this project -- every week . Not only will you then give yourself the necessary time to make sense of and reflect on the patterns in the research. By taking purposeful notes, developing a good organization structure and keeping up with the weekly annotations you will have produced a significant amount of text that you can use in the final paper. Collaboration is okay! While you are all writing individual papers, as with the TLS paper writing process,we encourage you to collaborate with your colleagues. Use them to help you find literature, to make sense of studies and seminar on possible conclusions. Use them as you need in order to make this a living, breathing, engaging and social process. Who will read your masters paper?A brief outline of what each chapter of the master’s paper entails:The Introduction is a discussion based on information available in the professional literature that address:- The scope, focus and relevance of the question- The importance of the question to (i) you and (ii) the educational community.- Description of controversies- Definitions of terms - Statement of limits.The Historical Background is an essay based on information in the literature that - Directly relevant to your question and the rationale you outline above.- Examines the historical bases for the question - Examines the social/political contexts related to the question- Traces evolution in the literature of people’s thinking about your question The Critical Review of the Literature is a thoughtful discussion about what the research and professional literature reveal about the question/topic. As part of this discussion you will - Describe and categorize the major points of view/ schools of thought surrounding your question.- Write a critical review of professional opinions or theories- Write a critical review of 30 empirical studies (at least 10 should be quantitative studies)The Conclusion is your thesis paper. Here you draw conclusions and make recommendations for your practice. You make clear how those conclusions are explicitly related to the historical background and the research you presented in chapters 2 & 3. Finally, you identify unanswered ornew questions that came up for you as a result of this review; and/or areas for future research.Take a good look at the developmental descriptors (rubric) for each of these chapters. There is a lot of information in them to help you structure and assess your progress. We will use this rubric to evaluate each of your
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