Project:

Impact of Online Journal Club on Educational Research Literacy: Towards New Model, Measurement, and Practice

Funding

JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists (22K13755)

Goals:

The main objectives are to create a new research literacy model, to develop and validate a measurement instrument of research literacy in the digital age, and to measure the effectiveness of the online journal club as an eLearning intervention for improving research literacy using the developed instrument. As interdisciplinary research, this study has the potential to create and lead a new branch of research and practice crossing the domains of eLearning, researcher development, and pedagogy. It will open new grounds to promote open and reusable research literacy training on the internet for the global audience.

Online Journal Club for Education Science Research

The journal club enjoys a long history of popularity among health care scholars and practitioners (Alguire, 1998; Burstein et al., 1996). Its first informal appearance was in London in the mid-1800s as recalled by British surgeon Sir James Paget (Esisi, 2007). Its first formal journal club was established by Canadian physician Sir William Osler at McGill University in Montreal in 1875 (Milbrandt & Vincent, 2004). In the field of healthcare, it is considered a group of individuals who meet regularly to evaluate critically the clinical application of recent articles in the medical literature (Milbrandt & Vincent, 2004). To search “journal club” within titles/abstracts/keywords of all publications in Scopus resulted in 2,538 records since 1900. A brief analysis of the distribution of these publications by discipline revealed that using journal club as a method prevails in healthcare-related disciplines with a recent spread to other disciplines such as science and engineering. The result confirmed that introducing the journal club to education science researchers and students will be a novel attempt, and its associated research, besides bearing all aforementioned contributions, will be also valuable to understanding the potential of the journal club as a pedagogy to train research literacy among a new audience.