Chapter 9. Using the ICE Framework in a Second Year Research Methods Class
9.1 Instructional Context
Val Michaelson – Brock University
Kanonhsyonne Janice Hill – Queen’s University
As a post-doctoral fellow cross-appointed between the Department of Public Health Sciences and the School of Religion and at Queens University, I was invited to teach the required departmental Research Methods course in the School of Religion. I was confident in the subject material, but I think, like many of us who are new to post-secondary teaching, creating a rubric and establishing a framework for assessment felt intimidating. I had taken a post-secondary teaching course at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at our University, and had learned about ICE. I knew it was evidence-based, and that a lot of very experienced teachers at the university were using it. I was so focussed on developing content and learning engaging teaching strategies that when I decided to use ICE as the assessment framework for our major assignment in research methods, I didn’t give it much more thought than that.
My original plan had been to use ICE for assessment. However, as I designed the rubric, I realized that the rubric itself was shaping the way that I designed the assignment. In brief, the assignment was to demonstrate, through a 30-minute presentation, students’ understanding of one research method that is used in social science research. In small groups, students chose one primary research study as the basis of their work, first as a catalyst for learning and eventually to illustrate their presentation. In their presentations, students were to teach the basics of the method that had been used in this study and answer questions such as: What is the method? What theory grounds the method? How does exploration of this theory confirm, contradict, or even expand how you have understood the role of theory in research to date? Does the method involve generating data? If so, how is this done? What kinds of ethical issues or challenges need to be considered? This was an opportunity to identify steps in a process and describe specific features of the method under study. It was a very basic demonstration of Ideas. In their second step, students were to make Connections by finding an additional study that used the same or a similar method, and then compare and contrast the ways the methods were used in each study. The third part of their task involved Extensions – it was to imagine a research question they could answer with this research method and then design their own study, justifying their methodological decisions. Though it was not part of my original plan, ICE helped me to design an assignment that would move beyond simply conveying information to engaging students at much deeper levels.
The joy I saw in most of my students as they shared their own studies captured that spark that I had been hoping to see. Many of them had discovered that research is exciting and that there are tools we can learn that will help us along. And most important, that it’s not just the professors who are researchers: they can learn to be researchers, too.
