Re-imagining Dissertation Research Credits to Facilitate Continuous Support of EdD Students (Poster 3)

• In Event: Scaffolding for Local Change-Making: Innovative EdD Supports Across Contexts

Abstract

The Doctor of Education program at X University is a 3-year, 63 credit, online and synchronous program designed for full-time educators and leaders. Rather than having students complete a traditional 5-chapter dissertation, students in Radford's EdD program carry out an improvement science dissertation in practice (ISDiP) (Perry et al., 2020), wherein they inquire into a problem of practice pervasive problem of practice (PoP) in their organizations (in year 1), develop a theory of improvement and practical measurement system to address that problem (in year 2), and then carry out iterative tests of change (in year 3) (Bryk et al., 2015; Hinnant-Crawford, 2020).

In line with more traditional doctoral programs, the program was initially designed to allocate nine credit hours of dissertation research for students' third year. However, in the first three years of running the program, we confronted some of the limitations of this design. In particular, we found that because our program has students engage in the improvement science process and write up their ISDiPs throughout the three years of their EdD program, they needed more time and support during the first two years of the program.

To address this problem, we decided to spread out the nine credits of dissertation research, such that each semester of the program students were enrolled in a 1-credit dissertation course. These courses would typically meet for an hour every other week (in contrast with the 3-credit courses which met for 2 hours each week). We also decided to have one core faculty member lead the development and teaching of these courses for a specific year of the program. We designed these courses to have several overarching goals across the three years of the program to improve both student experiences and outcomes as well as faculty experiences:

● To help students integrate what they are learning in other courses, including the practitioner inquiry and social justice courses, into their ISDiP;
● To foster a strong and supportive learning community within each cohort that supports professional growth, stewardship of the profession, and retention efforts;
● To introduce or review key skills related to carrying out an ISDiP that are not addressed in core classes; and
● To distribute the workload of chairing ISDiPs and supporting students in the process among core EdD throughout the three -year program.

In this poster session, we will describe our process for re-designing our dissertation credits, highlight the essential features of our new design, and discuss evidence of how this new 1-credit dissertation course sequence is influencing student experience. We will draw on annual programmatic survey data we collect to identify both successes and limitations of our design effort. Through this poster, we aim to contribute to research on how faculty in improvement-focused EdD programs can re-imagine program structures so that students can lead impactful DiPs in a reasonable time period (Firestone et al., 2021; Miitello et al., 2022; Pape, 2022; Stone-Johnson & Hayes, 2021).

Authors

• Maxwell Yurkofsky, Radford University

• Sarah Capello, Radford University