Introduction

This ERE program has been an opportunity for me to gain research skills, to
apply many ideas, and to achieve my ambition. It also helped me to meet the
goals I have had before, during, and after I started the program. I feel that
the Master's of Science in Educational Research and Evaluation (MS-ERE)
has been an opportunity for me to add research knowledge in quantitative,
qualitative, and mixed method research to my experience as a Libyan
teacher of English and educator. In addition to learning to conduct research
using qualitative and mixed-method techniques, I have been developing
skills of conducting quantitative design studies and research papers. My
initial, middle, and end of program developmental goals throughout program
served my main ambition of becoming a confident researcher who can work
with all three approaches of research without any difficulties.
Initial Program Goals
Middle of Program Goals
End of Program Goals
When I arrived at NIU, I had already been good in literature reviewing
and synthesizing from published resources, and I wanted to integrate my edit
qualities with using research methods and designs in my career. In fact, at
the beginning of the program I had almost known nothing about educational
research, especially the quantitative part. Now, that I have had the
opportunity to accomplish my work on the MS-ERE study program, it is
clear that I have become more skillful in aspects of qualitative and
quantitative research than before. For example, I learned how to design a
research study using methodologies and procedures of sampling, designing
surveys, using SPSS models, analyzing the data, data cleaning, discussing
the results and reporting them. During my work on this Master’s program, I
was not only able to participate in collaborative research papers and projects
with classmates, but I also had the valuable opportunities to learn from
presenting my work in conferences and workshops.

At first, my experiences with the program included conducting tentative

research projects, and learning some primary statistical research techniques,
such as defining the mean, median, mode, recognizing skewedness and
kurtosis from histograms, and using t-tests techniques. I also gained skills of
working with SPSS, which was completely a new experience to my
knowledge. Gradually my project skills became more solid and included
ideas such as locating appropriate data, creating a research questions related
to the data, describing the statistical method(s) to be used, and presenting the
results of the data analysis. Above all, this program helped me to improve
my skills of data analysis, use of technology in educational statistics, and
describing the results of statistical analyses in professional language.

Later, I started conducting more complicated research projects after

taking some advanced courses in quantitative research. Studying advanced
quantitative research techniques provided me with higher-level statistical
procedures; such as simple linear regression, multiple linear regression,
logistic regression, and analytical testing models such as ANOVA,
ANCOVA, and the like. Among other things, I have worked on output
visualizations such as descriptive data tables, summaries, frequencies,
diagrams of scatter plots, histograms, bar graphs, and multiple regression
model summaries, t-test samples, and other statistical tests to conclude my
research work. I also was able to learn how to incorporate details from SPSS
into HLM implications such as covariance, intercepts and slopes, assumption
of homoscedasticity, coefficients, analysis of variance (ANOVA), random
coefficient regression, multicolinearity, residuals independence, normal
distribution, etc.

Finally, use of technology in interpreting results of statistical analyses added

dimensions to my knowledge that are essential for me to achieve full
understanding of research methods. For me, participation in class projects,
research papers, and conference presentation was extremely helpful in that I
was able to use hands-on experience of research and to work with particular
types of data analyses. I collaborated with other classmates to learn more
advanced research techniques and strategies that will help me in the future as
a researcher and to utilize the quantitative research details in conducting
educational research related to my career.

My plans for the future include consolidating my practice with software

programs to be able to use them more effectively. Working with both
quantitative and qualitative methods has given me confidence in my skills as
a researcher and I can adventure in using the technology programs and data
analysis software related to different research designs. I believe that I have a
range of abilities for using as many research techniques and designs as
required according to the research variables or the background of the study
in hand. I can also use data software such as the SPSS and HLM which I
learned in my practice of MS-ERE projects and papers to prepare, analyze,
and evaluate my data outputs for presenting results and publishing them.