2025 APD Festival- Beyond surveys, focus groups and interviews: supporting students to use a range of approaches and methods in their dissertations and projects.
Overview / Event description
In this session participants will have the opportunity to discuss a range of research approaches and methods, each of which may prove suitable for students’ use in Level 6 and 7 dissertations and project work. The first part of the session will focus on ‘the nature of knowledge’: why different approaches and methods to building and disseminating knowledge are important to our different disciplinary and practice-based settings. Following this, participants will have opportunities to explore, discuss and reflect on some of the different approaches that have evolved to build that knowledge (both familiar and new), and consider their potential usefulness within their own contexts.
Objectives
By the end of the session participants will have had an opportunity to:
- Use Boyer’s ‘Scholarship Reconsidered’ as a starting point for deliberations on and planning for dissertation and project supervision.
- Hear about a number of different approaches and methods that may be useful to those supervising dissertations.
- Exchange ideas and experiences to build a collective ‘supervisory’ knowledge base and network.
Facilitator
Professor Liz Cleaver
Previous participants who attended said:
Just to say thank you very much for the session … it was really helpful. It's so easy in academia to get stuck in a rut doing the same things you've done for years and years… so it was incredibly helpful to have the session to think about some other methods.
The secondary data links [provided with the slides] are very useful.
V3 use scholarship, or research, or professional learning, or other evidence-informed approaches as a basis for effective practice
V5 collaborate with others to enhance practice
K1 how learners learn, generally and within specific subjects
K2 approaches to teaching and/or supporting learning, appropriate for subjects and level of study
K4 appropriate use of digital and/or other technologies, and resources for learning
A1 design and plan learning activities and/or programmes
A2 teach and/or support learning through appropriate approaches and environments
A4 support and guide learners
A5 enhance practice through own continuing professional development