School of Education MSc in Educational Leadership First Marking Form 30 Credit Module Reflective Journal Assessment and Final Assessments Student No: 169041648 Module: ED7587 Type of Assignment: Assignment 2.1 Title of Submission: Impact of school culture on effectiveness of teacher’s capacity and student learning I have read the Turni-tin Plagiarism Report (please highlight ap-propriate response) Yes I have identified a case of possible plagiarism in a note on Mystudent Record Yes No No Reason for not reading report: Overview (highlighting the strengths and areas for development of the assignment) In this assignment, you have demonstrated awareness to include arguments of both pro-fessional and academic rationale to highlight the significance of your professional chal-lenge. However you lack a clear research statement in the introduction. Your research questions tend to be too general and complicated, lacking clear definition of research contexts and variables. The dual research foci, which were stated later in the assign-ment, might have contributed further difficulty for you to narrow down your research questions. Your justifications of research paradigm and research strategies need to be further developed to ensure persuasion and avoid erroneous claims. The research focus/professional challenge (reference to how strongly the research focus is based on a professional and academic rationale with clear recognition of context) In the introduction, you have provided a discussion on the issue of school culture with references to both the academic literature and your school context. This shows your awareness about the importance of articulating both the professional and academic ra-tionale for choosing a research focus. However, the discussions of the academic litera-ture and your professional challenge in this section are sometimes separate, with the academic discussion featuring more prominently than discussion of your professional challenge. This hinders the reader from getting a very clear picture of your professional challenge and focus. You may need to better align these two sides of discussions so that the professional challenge becomes the main account and that reference to the academic literature is used appropriately to highlight/help understand issues in your professional context. In addition to a clear account of the professional challenge, you also need to include in the introduction a clear research statement which is currently lacking. Your research statement only appears towards the end of your Research Strategy section. [“The cur-rent research focuses on identifying educational leader’s role in eradicating barriers in the education process as well on the impact of different norms of school culture”.] And this statement suggests that you have dual research foci. You are also expected to make links to broader educational policy contexts in this as-signment that can be seen as external influences on leadership or school policies in your own school context. However no clear reference is noted in this regard. Finally, you need to apply some caution and tentativeness in the inferences or conclu-sions that you derive in order to ensure accuracy when paraphrasing or synthesising views from the literature. For example, phrases such as ‘.. is quite certain to improve..’ is un-academic and is an optimistic assertion rather than a carefully-judged research claim. The research questions (reference to how clear and feasible the research questions are and how strongly linked to the professional challenge and academic rationale) First, your research questions tend to be general, lacking clear references to specific contexts of research. This can render your research too general and broad to be feasible. For example, it is very unlikely that you will find answers to the RQ3 that are true in every context through your very small scale research. A question like this would proba-bly need to be addressed with the collaborative efforts of international researchers over a sustained period of time. You will need to apply context limit to your research, i.e. either within your school contexts or schools with similar background to yours that can be accessed for research and be clear how the research question is appropriately formu-lated for your context. Second, your research questions tend to be over complicated and often involve multiple concepts and/or variables. This will make it very difficult to investigate the relationships among those variables because one set of relationships may be conditional upon another. You will need to simplify the research questions so that they each include no more than two variables. Third, your research questions do not seem to match the research focus identified in your working title which is ‘impact of school culture’. In fact only RQ3 is about mea-suring impact while RQ1 is about understanding factors and RQ2 and RQ4 about de-veloping leadership practices. You will need to think further about clarifying research focus and aligning research questions closely with research focus. Literature review (ELLC)/Research design (EIEL, OEIT, RM) (reference to how strongly a con-ceptual framework has been developed from a review of relevant literature or how strong a justification of a ‘fit for purpose’ research design has been presented) You stated an intention to adopt a positivist paradigm but your justification was not sufficiently convincing. It is important to note that a positivist paradigm does not simply equal quantification. In relation to the research strategy, you need to differentiate between research design and research method (for example, a case study is a research design and a survey is a method). You based your choice of a survey method on its capacity for collecting data from a large sample. However you didn’t make a clear argument about why and how a large sample was required by your research questions. You also briefly mentioned the method of interview but did not elaborate its relevance to specific research questions or how you would triangulate qualitative and quantitative data. Action points (a list of feed forward advice towards developing the next assignment or more general advice about increasing achievement at Masters level) - Your title needs to accurately and concisely reflect your research focus (and ideally context of research). - You need to develop a clearer and more focused account of your professional chal-lenge. - You need to make reference to the broader education or policy contexts and their relevance to issues and challenges in the context of your research. - You need to include a clear research statement in the introduction section. You also need to narrow down your research focus so that it does not include dual foci. - You need to simplify your research questions and apply context limit to your re-search so that it is feasible. - You need to read the methodology text in more depth and develop more convincing justifications for your methodological choices. - You need to apply more caution and tentativeness when paraphrasing or synthesis-ing views from literature, including the methodology literature, in order to avoid as-sertive or erroneous claims. Marker (first): Dr. Haiyan Xu Date: 10.04.2017