Handbook for Research in Cooperative Education and Internships

This work aims to help cooperative education and internship professionals design, carry out, and disseminate quality research and evaluation studies of work-based education. It offers examples of work-based education, but with a practical twist - the chapter authors frame their studies within a specific key research design issue - including finding a starting point and a theoretical framework, fitting research into one’s busy practitioner workload, deciding on particular data-gathering methods and an overall methodological approach, integrating qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and disseminating results. Also addressed are questions and concerns that are relevant throughout the course of a research project: the use of theory in research; the role and relationship of programme assessment to research; and ethical considerations in research.