Author Archives: Andrew Defty
What are aims and objectives?
This excellent post by Pat Thomson, Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham is essential reading. Professor Thomson, blogs about academic writing and research, and her posts are well worth following. In this post Professor Thomson deals with the knotty and often ignored … Continue reading
How to do a discourse analysis
Students embarking on their undergraduate research project often claim that they want to carry out some form of discourse analysis without any clear idea what this means. This useful article from the PoliticsEastAsia blog provides a comprehensive introduction to discourse analysis … Continue reading
Let’s hear it for librarians, the pitbulls of democracy
I don’t like the phrase, ‘library-based research’. It implies that research either takes place in the library or somewhere else. That students can choose between undertaking their own fieldwork or spending time in the library reading the findings of others … Continue reading
British cycling, the aggregation of marginal gains and improving our learning
I do a bit of cycling, I mainly do it because I enjoy it, (most of the time), and because I also think it helps me to work. In this I’m in agreement with the sociologist, Kristin Luker, who, rather mischeviously … Continue reading
Drawing Circles and Flowers: identifying the literature
One problem students often encounter when embarking on their own research project is identifying the literature on their chosen topic. For many undergraduate students this is a new skill because for most courses they are provided with often quite lengthy prescriptive reading lists. … Continue reading