Learning Activity 2.5

My research topic: Benefits and disadvantages of online learning in high school mathematics education and the implications it has on practice in the online classroom. 

For my topic, I plan to use mostly articles from academic journals. I hope to be able to find reliable evidence-based and anecdotal, opinion-based articles. Since technology in education is constantly changing and progressing, journal articles will be the most current form of research available. While I generally prefer to use books, I think it will be difficult to find current information in this medium since technology can change a lot even in the span of one or two years.

Personally, I like to check the credibility of a source by first researching the author and what organizations or institutions he or she is affiliated with. I then check the references of the original source by doing the same, checking the academic and professional background of the authors. One thing I also like to do is to find the article on Google Scholar because there is an option to see how many times an article has been cited in other works. I prefer to use articles that have been cited many times over articles that have not been cited before because this means that others have found the article credible.

I find that when checking the credibility of the authors, it is very good practice because it also leads to other potential sources of information for your research. Oftentimes researching an author will lead to other related works by him or her that can be used for the research topic as well. When finding other works that cite the article of interest, I am usually able to use some of the new articles in my own research as well.

Original assignment post can be found here.