Invitation: Participate in Research on Top Ten Educational Psychology Programs

Post date: Jan 19, 2015 2:42:55 PM

I am writing to invite you to let me know if you might be interested in working on a study of the top ten Educational Psychology programs in the U.S. News 2014 ranking. (Do you know what these top ten are? Do you know what data determine these rankings? Are you thinking of applying for a faculty position in educational psychology? Do you know how many faculty constitute educational psychology at these top ranked departments? Curious?)

By way of background… swiftly flow the years…ten years ago I worked with a team of 5 extraordinarily brilliant, talented, highly selected EPET PhD students to analyze the websites of the 2003 top ten educational psychology programs. One goal was to glean ideas for the enhancement of our own EPET website.

We looked at the websites through the lens of what prospective students could find out… and not find out… about these programs, such as how many students are in the program, what is the probability of completing the PhD and the mean duration to completion, and what kinds of jobs have recent graduates found?

Another goal was to better understand what “educational psychology” really means as instantiated in these top ranked programs. I think is accurate to say that all of us learned a lot about the meanings of educational psychology.

We worked as a team, with each participant focusing on two of the top ten websites. We met and developed coding categories, such as number of faculty, types of courses, information about students, etc. Then after spending some hours coding our assigned websites, we met, discussed initial results, revised our coding categories, then re-coded etc. Below are links to the AERA proposal and the Powerpoint that we used in presenting the poster session that resulted at AERA 2004.

So I now want to repeat the study ten years later and starting first with the websites of the programs, then drilling down in greater detail. My current vision is to create separate sheets in Google for each program, which will initially be shared only among the research team members. Then, when we have some confidence in the reliability of our coding, I plan to contact the chairperson of each of these top ten programs and invite them to review, critique and suggest revisions to our coding of their program. We will submit a conference proposal and a manuscript for review.

What you might gain from this would include a rich understanding of variety of the ways educational psychology is organized at these universities, which may help you in thinking about your career aspirations and job search. You will also learn about the ways websites are, or are not, well designed from the perspectives of students.

Participants would need to have time to commit to the work of meeting, developing categories, coding, meeting to discuss, then revising data, followed by doing reliability checks. Altogether this might amount to something like 10 hours of meeting and 20-30 hours of coding, spread out over January through March. The amount of work will obviously be a function of how many people work on the project.

If you are working on your dissertation, or should be, then you should stay focused on that priority, so I would discourage anyone at the dissertation stage from working on this project. (We will share a preliminary look at what we learned with the EPET community when we have completed our analyses.)

If you think you might be interested in working on this project, please email me expressing interest and identifying any of the top ten programs for which you would have familiarity. (In the 2004 study, for example, I coded Stanford and UW-Madison, because I was familiar with them.) Please also tell me where you are in your studies… practicum, comps etc… and something about your other commitments during spring semester as TAs or RAs. It would be worth discussing with your advisor whether this would be a good use of your time.

Finally, I would note that some of the students who worked on this study ten years ago have gone on to fame and fortune at top ranked academic programs and in the creative entrepreneurial world. However, there is little evidence to support a claim that work on this project contributed significantly at the .05 level to their meteoric rise.

Thanks,

Patrick Dickson, Professor

Educational Psychology & Educational Technology http://www.msu.edu/~pdickson

http://edutech.msu.edu/programs/doctoral http://www.tinyurl.com/pdickson-googlescholar

Michigan State University http://pensiveprofessor.blogspot.com

East Lansing, MI 48824 (517) 355-4737 (voice mail)

Supplemental Readings:

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-education-schools/education-psychology-rankings?int=9a2b08

1 Stanford

2 UW-Madison

3 UM-Ann Arbor

4 Vanderbilt