EDD 630, Section 9575
Educational Research Seminar: Overcoming Adversity
Fall, 2012

Tuesdays, 6:30 – 8:10 pm
Room 3S – 115

Course Materials

All course materials will be made available before being covered in class in the online course schedule. They will also be sent to your preferred email address at the same time.

Although we will occasionally use non-primary sources, most of the course materials will be primary sources such as peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.

Course Organization

Our first semester of the EDD 630-631 sequence will be generally devoted to:

1. Exploring the factors and developmental mechanisms related to overcoming adversity and nurturing resilience among children and adolescents. You will design an educational intervention that uses this understanding to support students’ academic and/or personal growth.


2. Discussing some of the ways that emotions affect learning and academic performance. This will be done through two, general topics: the effects of emotions on memory encoding and retrieval and the roles of stress and motivation on performance.


3. Understanding scientific inquiry, its proper uses and methods, and its utility for gaining knowledge. You will use this understanding to design an appropriate and feasible evaluation of the intervention you design.

We will also discuss the some of the ways that emotions affect learning.

During the second semester, you will also conduct, analyze, and present the evaluation of your intervention. Therefore, the intervention you design must be one you can indeed implement—either alone or in collaboration with a small group of course-, community-, or school-based colleagues. Likewise, the evaluation must be both possible and apposite.

Although I will not be able to avoid teacher-centered lectures fairly often—especially when covering the scientific method—I will incorporate student participation as much as I can. Of course, one cannot participate in a conversation on a topic without information on the topic. Therefore, I will typically assign readings about two weeks before it is covered in class and will expect everyone to have read them enough to discuss them. Given the prominence of topics discussions in this section, a large portion of your final grade (40%) will be composed of class engagement.

Throughout the semester, please feel free to come to me outside of class (in person, through email, etc.) with questions, comments, etc., especially as you develop your idea and then the proposal itself. Nonetheless, as the semester progresses, I will expect you to first go to your fellow students more and more for assistance and feedback. As I’m sure you know, one of the best ways to learn is to teach.

In addition to any meetings outside of class that you initiate, I will meet with you during the course’s conference hours to address issues specific to the development of your program and its evaluation. If you cannot meet during the conference hours listed above, please let me know so we can schedule other times to meet.

Electronic Communication

I will post course information online and communicate with you through email. You may use the computers on campus (e.g., in 3S-206) to access relevant websites and email. However, if you do not have ready access to the Internet outside of school and using the college facilities is problematic, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can work around this. Please let me know of any problems promptly since I will expect you to read or respond to communications sent to your declared e-mail address or made available to you online.

Special Accommodations

Please let me know as soon as possible of any special accommodations you may require. I will happily do all I possibly can to meet any and all needs you have.

Course Objectives

Even if not necessarily the final courses you take, the EDD 630/631 sequence likely represents the most advanced course in education you will complete. It provides the opportunity to synthesize your various areas of educational knowledge into an understanding and perspective that is uniquely your own. Therefore, the primary objective of the sequence is the ability to demonstrate the creation of a sophisticated and state-of-the-art position relevant to this section’s topic, overcoming adversity.

To this end, our section’s objectives and their respective outcomes are:

In general, I regard students in EDD 630/631 as nascent colleagues. You are, literally, becoming masters of your profession, and I respect your accomplishments. I can lead and teach you, but I believe it is more honest and true to life to treat you as fellow professionals who have a lot to offer both your fellow class members and me.

Assessment and Management

Attendance and Participation

Regular class attendance and participation is expected. As per college policy, a student who is absent for more than four hours—this includes accumulated time missed due to lateness—will be assigned a grade of WU unless I explicitly excuse the absences.

Your active contribution to the course comprise part of your final course grade. Of course, one can contribute to (and detract from) a class in many ways. Therefore, I construe positive class participation broadly: The more your classmates benefit from your active engagement in the course, the more I will consider you to be performing sufficiently in this regard.

Course Work

The writing you will do leading up to your final project for the semester will be reviewed by your peers and by me. Your fellow students will provide most of the formative assessments of your work. I will assess the initial writings you complete to establish the general type and scale of feedback I would like you to give your peers. I will then review both your subsequent writing and the reviews you are given on it. From the writing you do leading up to your final project and from the feedback you give your fellow students I will compute your course writing grade.

Your final project, however, will only be graded by me. I would prefer you to submit this final project electronically (e.g., through email), but you can instead submit a paper copy. The final project and the rubric I will use to assess it are given below.

Any work you submit should conform to American Psychological Association guidelines, using either the fifth or sixth edition. Both the library and I have copies of these manuals.

Honor Policy

It should go without saying that you are expected to conduct yourself in an honorable and honest way in all aspects of this course. Of course, any known deviations from this will result in a failing grade for this section and forfeiture of access to this section in the future.

Online Ethics Training

CSI understandably requires that anyone affiliated with the college who collects “extra” data (e.g., the sorts of data you will collect for your research project) must complete an online training course in research ethics. You will receive the equivalent of an A on a quiz (i.e., 5% of your final grade) for completing this online training.

You must complete this online training by October 16th. To do this:

1. Log into https://www.citiprogram.org/default.asp.
2. Click the “Register for the CITI Course” button.
3. Click the down arrow under “Participating Institutions.”
4. Scroll down to choose “City College (CUNY).”
5. Fill in the required boxes for registration, and click “Submit.”
6. Fill in the CUNY information form and click “Submit.”
7. Choose to “Take the Human Subjects Basic Course.”
8. Then select “HSR for Social & Behavioral Faculty, Graduate Students & Postdoctoral Scholars.” When asked, oddly, check “No” to continue with your current selection.
9. Complete all eleven required modules. When you’ve gotten at least 80% correct, you will have passed a given module.
10. When you’ve passed them all, return to the main page. Under “Completion Reports” it will now say “Print” (instead of Not Earned).
11. Click “Print.” A tab (or window) should open showing a “Human Research Curriculum Completion Report” that should look something like this. Note that the completion report shows that each of the 11 modules was passed.
12. Finally, please submit your completion report by either:
    • saving and emailing it to me, or
    • printing it out and bringing it to class.

IRB Proposal

An additional requirement of any investigation conducted in affiliation with higher education is to complete a proposal that is then vetted by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), which ensures that the investigation does not present undue harm to the participants. Fortunately, for the evaluations we will conduct here, the proposal is relatively simple. The steps to follow and forms to fill out are here, and more about this process as it pertains to us is explained here.

Grading Weights

Tentative Section Schedule

Following is a tentative schedule for our section. Of course, this schedule and its content may well be altered to better meet your needs and interests as well as the course objectives.

Any updates to the schedule will be made to this online schedule. You may have to refresh this page in your browser window (e.g., by pressing the F5 key) to see the changes.