Volume 4 Issue 1 (February 2012) - Ozean Publications

European Journal of Educational Studies 4(1), 2012
deployment of any level of cognitive skills that might be developed in research is laid. In the other hand, significant
changes in cognitive behaviour would imply that skills necessary for carrying out educational research has been
gained. Desirable changes in both types of behaviour are necessary for effective capacity building. To what extent
therefore is our current academic culture as well as our associated graduate education strategies lead to assembling
the necessary research capacity (Silliman, 2007).
METHODOLOGY
This is a quantitative study with a one-group pretest-posttest pre-experimental design to determine the effectiveness
of a research capacity building course in bringing about significant desirable changes in both cognitive and affective
behaviour among graduate education students in UB. Data for this study was collected from UB graduate education
students who took the first of the two fundamental courses in educational research for graduate students in the
faculty of education in 2007. The students were free not to participate in the study, so of the 83 students who
registered for the course 73 of them participated fully in the study. Of this number, 51 were females while 22 were
males.
The questionnaire used in the study was developed by first listing several indicants (Kerlinger & Lee, 2000) of the
cognitive and affective variables involved in both the course objectives and in capacity building. These were then
developed into statements intended to elicit the level of related behaviour under measurement possessed by the
participant. The instrument was given to two colleagues and three teaching assistants/graduate students for face
validation. Their corrections and suggestions were incorporated in the revision of the instrument. The resulting
questionnaire (see Tables 1 & 2) had 17 items each designed to measure students‟ cognitive and affective behaviour
respectively. Subjects were requested to react to each of the statements by choosing the level to which they agreed
or disagreed with it. The agreement scale had six options ranging from „very strongly disagree‟ to „very strongly
agree‟. A Cronbach alpha analysis of the reliability of the instrument for the cognitive behaviour gave an alpha value
of .943, while that for the affective behaviour gave an alpha value of .913. The same instrument was administered on
the first day of class and again during the last day of class in the course. Out of the 83 students who registered for
the course 73 completed the pre- and post- administrations of the questionnaire. Their responses were scored,
entered and analysed using the SPSS quantitative data analysis computer package.
Data Analysis and Interpretations of Results
To answer the research question posed for the study, the participants‟ mean pre- and post- responses for each of the
two sets of 17 items derived from indicators of the cognitive and affective variables involved in the course
objectives were compared using the dependent t-test statistical analysis. A significant change given what each of the
questionnaire items was measuring would indicate the effectiveness of the course given the related course
objectives. These were tested at .01 alpha level. The results, as presented on Tables 1 and 2, show a significant level
of effectiveness of the course in bringing about desirable behavioural shift among graduate education students who
took the course in all the cognitive behaviour and in all but two (enthusiasm about research and fear of research) of
the affective items. The size of the effect of the course on the behaviour reflected by each of the items was
calculated (Cohen, 1988). For the affective items the effect size ranged from 0.03 for „level of enthusiasm about
research‟ to 1.17 for „appreciation of the systematic and logical nature of the research process.‟ Given the standard
interpretation of d = 0.2 as a small effect size, d = 0.5 as medium, and d = 0.8 as large (Cohen, 1988), the course had
at least a small effect in all but the level of enthusiasm about research.
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