Program Requirements >> Preliminary Exams

1. The examination procedure requires you to read a journal article that is chosen by the faculty in MQM and respond to a set of questions about that article. To familiarize yourself with the examination and the examination process, you should first read the Preliminary Examination Guidelines, which can be found in the Forms page. This document contains an FAQ about the Preliminary Examination policies, the questions for which you will write answers, and the scoring criteria.

2. You should become familiar with general research methodology, statistical, and measurement concepts like those presented in CEP 930, CEP 932, and CEP 920. Particularly, you should familiarize yourself with concepts relating to internal, external, statistical, and construct validity and how those concepts apply to critiquing a research study. Most texts that are appropriate for research methodology courses contain a good summary of those concepts. One example is the following text.

   Fraenkel, J.R., & Wallen, N.E. (2000). How to design and evaluate research in education (4th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

3. You should read journal articles and practice answering the questions contained in the guidelines as they relate to those journal articles. A book that does a good job of commenting on articles in a manner similar to that required for the Preliminary Examination is the following.

   Girden, E.R. (2001). Evaluating research articles: From start to finish (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

4. The faculty creates a rubric for scoring examination responses to the article chosen each year. (Click here to download the rubric.) Below are citations for two articles that have been used in practice sessions as well as the rubrics that were written by MQM faculty members (Keogh was written by Ed Wolfe and Guthrie was written by Mark Reckase) for those articles and example responses to those articles written by MQM students who have passed the preliminary examination (Keogh was written by Jonathan Manalo and Guthrie was written by Joseph Martineau).

   To practice for the examination, you should obtain the article, read it, and write a response to each question shown in the Preliminary Examination Guidelines prior to reading the rubrics and the example responses.

   Keogh, T., Barnes, P., Joiner, R., & Littleton, K. (2000). Gender, pair composition and computer versus paper presentations of an English language task. Educational Psychology, 20, 33-43.

   You can download the Keogh Rubric and Response from the Forms Page

   Guthrie, J.T. (1998). Locating information in documents: Examination of cognitive models. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 178-191.

   You can download the Guthrie Rubric and Response from the Forms Page

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