• Your "exploding" journals are meant to be a resource for future work in quantitative research. The journal will be a place for your current you to explain a variety of TECHNICAL topics (ranging from very simple to complex) to a future you who may have forgotten almost everything you learned in this course, as you usually do with courses.


  • Your journals are "exploding" journals because every TECHNICAL entry you include will fully explode a topic so that it will be relatively easy to come back to, even if you're coming back completely "cold" on the topic years from now.


  • Every topic included in your journal will include three important sections:

    1. A written definition or explanation of the topic, IN YOUR OWN WORDS. It's very important that you use your own words...partly so that you aren't plagiarizing someone else's words (and this is no small matter), and also because you are more likely to understand your words or explanation in the future than you will be to understand anyone else's words.

    2. A visual representation or explanation of the topic. This might be a graph, a sketch, a diagram, etc. It will be a way for you to relate the written definition to other ways in which the same topic might surface in other formats in your future. This would include, but should not be limited to any mathematical notation or equations associated with the topic.

    3. An example that clearly puts the topic into practice.


  • Journal entries are to be emailed to Britton.Shepardsonnau.edu in typed PDF format before class each Tuesday.


  • Note that there is no set minimum or maximum number of topics that should be entered in your journals each week. You are to include all terms or topics that you feel will be important to your understanding of quantitative research methods in the future. Remember, this activity is for your benefit and your grade each week will simply reflect whether you took the task seriouly (10 pts), put forth less than an adequate amount of time and effort (5 pts), or missed the deadline completely (0 pts). You might find that the number of topics you include in your journal fluctuates from week to week as well.


  • Beware that your journal will require significantly more effort than simply creating a glossary. For many of the visual representations, you may have to spend considerable time using Excel, PowerPoint, PhotoShop, or other programs.


  • Journals will be posted to our class website for sharing and comparing, so that we might consider different ways of understanding the same topics or help each other fill in gaps.