Primary Research or Secondary Research for an Ed.D. degree?

Anyone out there have experience with an EdD degree? I was wondering what kind of dissertation research is usually required. Since it's not a PhD, do some schools require only secondary research, with no direct experiment requirement?

 

Even better, you can view the dissertations at LU:

DigitalCommons@Liberty University

 

Thank you for that. I'm also interested in hearing about the policies of as many other schools as I can.

 

You can also use ProQuest to view other dissertations specific to EdDs.

 

While a few Ed.D. programs allow a more applied project as the culminating activity, the vast majority of Ed.D. programs require the same type of original research dissertation as Ph.D. programs. "Secondary" research would be more common at the masters thesis level.

The only published comparision of Ph.D. vs. Ed.D. dissertations (over 1,900 of them) was done in the 1990s and found that descriptive research designs were the most common for both Ph.D. and Ed.D. dissertations and analysis of variance (ANOVA) was the most commonly used statistical method for both. Both had exactly the same percentages of applied versus basic research (88% vs. 12%). The use of multivariate statistics, such as MANOVA was different, but was used in a very low percentage for both Ph.D. (7%) and Ed.D. (2%) dissertations.

Other than a few institutions, such Vanderbilt--which has completely re-done its Ed.D. to separate it from the Ph.D.--there tends to be little difference between the two degrees (other than the perception that the Ed.D. is, somehow, a "lower" degree).

 

Thank you, Dr. P. I was especially hoping to hear from you on this one!

 

You're welcome. When I was finishing my bachelor's, Russ Osguthorpe was conducting what turned out to be the largest study on the Ed.D. versus Ph.D. in education and found almost no difference between the two. A year later, I conducted a study comparing the M.S., M.A. and M.Ed. in instructional technology and also found no significant differences according to degree title. Dr. Osguthorpe published his study, but I did not know that students could actually publish, so I never published mine. Later, I nearly completed a Ph.D. at Arizona State University, but was offered a job in California that I couldn't refuse. I was accepted to doctoral programs at four universities, but the best fit for me was the one that awarded an Ed.D. I found that the coursework and dissertation requirements were the same between my Ph.D. and Ed.D. programs, so I sought out all of the studies comparing the two degrees since 1980 (over two dozen of them--all finding little or no difference) and have been droning on about it on Degreeinfo for several years

After recently conducting a study on the DBA vs. Ph.D. in business for the IACBE conference, a colleague and I have decided to re-do my (now 20 year-old) study on degree titles at graduate programs in instructional technology (M.A., M.S., M.Ed., Ph.D & Ed.D.)

 

I would love to read that when it is available. I'm toying with a few research questions involving educational technology as possible topics for my dissertation.