PhD in Education, need help on a topic

Greetings and Complements of the season!!!

A female friend of mine, interested in doing a PhD in Education, she has a Master's degree in General Education and another Masters in TESOL from Charles Sturt Uni in Australia.

The problem is she cant think of a topic to apply for a PhD program and I would greatly appreciated if degreeinfo members can assists her in thinking of a topic.

She is open to all suggestions and advice.

Many thanks,

Migara

 

Take a look at this site. Most of the information is on Adult Education, but some of the topics have research questions which focus on learning behavior, learning styles, pedagogical approaches to life long learning, etc. Perhaps your friend may find area of interest which she can pursue.

http://www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-0104-muller.html

 

IMHO, if she is not passionate about an issue in her field, and needs help from others to find a question, then she should not bother doing a PhD.

Cheers,

George

 

I will let her know what people said thus fair... thanks

Migara

 

I'm writing a dissertation proposal at Touro that applies cognitive dissonance theory to consumer marketing promotion with some new twists. I've stumbled on to something interesting relative to education theory that someone should investigate: dissonance reduction as an instructional tool. Have your friend write me at [email protected] for additional thoughts.

No worries,

Dave

 

Why not ask former professors about areas they find intriguing or that they think merit more investigation?

 

I take it your friend is not actually looking for a dissertation topic yet, but needs one for a statement of purpose to apply to the university.

Usually the statement of purpose only has to indicate what area the student is interested in and why. It's very common for the actual topic to change a few times over the course of the PhD program after additional coursework, literature review, comments from faculty, etc.

The faculty know this, but need a general idea of what your friend wants to research in order to see if she would be a fit in their department, find a suitable dissertation advisor, and hopefully some funding.

My statement of purpose was less then a page and was something like, "Even though I know little about it, I'm very interested in how {xxxxx} and {xxxxx} affects {xxxxx} because of my background in {xxxxxx}. The faculty here at {xxxxx} are experts in {xxxxxx} and I feel that their expertise would be a perfect match for my goals."