Educational research postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in educational research began with a seminar exercise rather than a grand question. We were given two summaries of the same evaluation of a reading intervention, one written for a newspaper and one for a research journal, and asked what had been lost in translation. The newspaper version reported that the programme "worked". The journal article described a small sample, uneven implementation across sites and effects that varied by pupil. I found the gap between the two accounts more interesting than the intervention itself, and it has shaped what I have chosen to study since.

My Education Studies degree has given me a foundation in both the sociology of education and research methods. I have most enjoyed modules where the two meet: analysing how attainment gap statistics are constructed, for example, and what is obscured when categories such as "disadvantaged" are applied to very different circumstances. I have covered quantitative methods through to multiple regression using secondary datasets, and qualitative approaches including thematic analysis and interviewing. My strongest work has been in research design, where I scored highly on a proposal critiquing a published evaluation that used volunteer schools as its comparison group.

My dissertation is a small interview study with twelve Year 13 students about how they use past papers when revising. I chose the topic because past papers are recommended constantly and studied rarely. Designing the study taught me more than the findings did. My first interview schedule assumed students revised alone and to a plan; the early transcripts showed messy, social and often interrupted practices, so I revised my questions and adopted a more open approach for the remaining interviews. Coding the transcripts made me appreciate how much interpretation is involved in even a modest qualitative study, and how important it is to keep an audit trail of decisions. Writing up the limitations section honestly, including my reliance on students recruited through one college, has been a useful discipline. I would like to learn more sophisticated ways of handling questions of sampling, reflexivity and validity, which is my main reason for applying.

Outside my studies I work Saturdays and some weekday evenings in a garden centre café, where I have trained three new starters and take responsibility for stock checks at closing. The job has taught me to work accurately when tired and to explain the same procedure patiently in different ways. I also volunteer fortnightly at a community homework club, mostly with children in Years 5 and 6. I am not a teacher and do not pretend to be, but sitting with a child who has decided they are bad at fractions has made me cautious about research that treats motivation as a stable individual trait rather than something produced in particular rooms with particular adults.

My reading has extended beyond the reading lists. I found Dylan Wiliam's writing on assessment useful for thinking about how evidence is actually used by practitioners, and I follow the Education Endowment Foundation's published reports, partly to see how findings are summarised for schools and how much uncertainty survives that process.

In the longer term I would like to work in an evaluation or policy research role, or to go on to doctoral study on assessment practice. A master's focused on research methods is the sensible next step: I want the technical grounding to design studies that can bear the weight of the conclusions drawn from them.