Education IV Program
Education IV consists of one unit of study:
This unit is compulsory for most BEd students and is most commonly taken in the fourth year. Students from the different programs do it with their fellow program students in a particular semester. (In 2006, Primary and HMHE students did it in Semester 1, while Secondary (Combined degree) students did it in Semester 2.)
The unit has a special history. Since 2006, when the Faculty of Education and Social Work disbanded its old Honours BEd program, a new way of awarding Honours to students needed to be found.
Instead of a small group of students writing an Honours thesis, all students have access to an Honours result if their assessment scores reach certain levels. The fourth year is weighted highly, and in particular, the unit of study: EDUF4044 - Reading and Designing Research is weighted highly in the determination of an Honours result.
This unit builds on work previously done in the BEd degree which prepares students to use and conduct research in education.
There are two main ideas addressed:
- The idea that the teacher or education worker should be aware of, and know how to use research done by others, that may affect his or her own practice or educational context. This is the idea of the teacher or education worker as a critical and sensible consumer, or user, of research.
- The idea that the teacher or education worker can design their own small-scale research projects. These may help her or him in solving educational problems or developing their own practice in positive ways. The fields for such action might include personal teaching practice, curriculum, or whole school development.
This unit concentrates on developing skills such as framing a research question, searching relevant academic literature relevant to such a question, writing a literature review, developing a research methodology, and understanding the "truth claims" that might be made from research done by using different methods and methodologies.