Evaluating Teaching Methods Research Articles published in Iraqi Academic Journals

Teaching Methods research , which lies under the umbrella of educational research , has witnessed rapid development , however, very few if any have examined the quality of these articles .Therefore ,This study aimed at evaluating Teaching Methods research articles published in Iraqi journals between 2015 and 2019 in the light of suggested evaluation criteria developed by the researcher . A descriptive-analytical approach was manipulated to achieve the goals of the study. The main tool the researcher used to collect data was a content analysis card. The researcher has benefited from related literature , journals , previous studies, and books to build the criteria of evaluation of his study tool. A total of 160 papers were examined to evaluate the components of research article . The study is considered to be important since it is a second to none in the specialization of Teaching Methods in Iraq. The findings of this study indicate that the total mean score of all categories and subcategories of the 160 articles increase overtly ; 6608 ( rating score ) , 41.300 ( Mean ) , 82.60 relative weight on the 5-point scale , which means that these articles strongly met the suggested evaluation criteria.


1.Introduction The Problem of the Study and its Significance
For decades , education and teaching have been systematically investigated . "Teaching Methods ( henceforth TMs) research , which lies under the umbrella of "educational research has been increasing in amount at a very rapid pace" (Göktaş, H et al. ,2012)" , which "can be regarded in this sense as "it is an important indicator of development level of educational system of a country" (Gülmez & Yavuz, 2016). Besides a variety of activities held in a field, TM research reveals the production and accumulation of knowledge in that field (Yılmaz & Altınkurt, 2012). Concordantly TMs research reveals the level of knowledge in educational context and particularly research regarding instruction affects the teaching practice by leading the implications in the teaching institutions and forming the basis for educational reforms".
"Inquiry into teaching has been tracked for basically three different purposes. First, scholars and researchers aim to understand better the processes involved, to develop the knowledge base of teaching, and to contribute to theoretical frameworks, which help to conceptualize teaching. Second, inquiry into teaching has also been pursued for the purposes of improving practice. This is particularly the case, for instance, in action research studies that generally follow a cycle, beginning with the identification of a practical problem or area of concern, followed by the gathering of evidence using various research methods, decisions about how to change practice, and then the gathering of further evidence to monitor the effects of the change .Third, inquiry is fundamental to professional preparation, and research methods may be employed by student teachers, for example, in helping to make sense of their observations of teaching and in developing their own practice".(Westwood, P. S. (2008).
Published TMs research is the distribution system by which academics and scholars "acquire much of their understanding of today's teaching problems". In this critical communicative process, the need for sound research meaningful, interpretable information is imperative. Yet, considerable doubt has been raised as to the The value of this research stems from the fact that it is of vital significance in several areas in the TMs specification ; Scarcity of analytical research has been done to the Iraqi TM researches ;Therefore, this study seeks to develop a theoretical analytical framework for research in the TM specialization .It also Identifies the real quality of TM researches published in Iraqi journals Furthermore, the study is considered of vital significance due to the fact that it directs researchers and scholars to address a variety of issues that have not been addressed before 1.

2.The Aims of the Study
The researcher sets two main aims in this study. "First, to examine the research quality of TM journal articles published in Iraqi journals . Second , to develop a valid and reliable rubric for evaluating TM research quality that is closely aligned with the internationally established criteria for evaluating TM research" .

Limits of the Study Spatial and Time Limits:
The content of 160 TMs scholarly articles published in ten Iraqi academic journals during the period 2015-2019were analyzed and evaluated.

1.4.The Procedures of the Study
"The procedure of quantitative content analysis in the study followed the steps described in Neuendorf (2002)" as cited in Zhao, J., et.al.. (2017) : "(a) deciding content to be examined (i.e., TMs journal articles ), (b) choosing and defining the variables to be examined (i.e., evaluation criteria for TMs research), (c) sampling the material to be analyzed (i.e., random sampling), (d) developing standardized categories and coding rubric (see the appendix), (e) training raters and conducting preliminary rater reliability check, (f) coding the material with final rater reliability check, and (g) analyzing the results"

2.Theoretical Literature 2.1. Research on Teaching Methods
"In his 1964 address to the Associated Organizations for Teacher Education, Nate Gage-known to many as the father of research on teaching-made an impassioned plea for research on and for teacher education (Gage, N. L. (1978) . He believed both research about effective teaching that could inform the content of teacher education (research for teacher education) and research about the results of different ISSN: 00333077 520 www.psychologyandeducation.net approaches to recruiting and preparing teachers that could inform how teachers are educated (research on teacher education) . Gage's plea for investments in research for teacher education was heard. During the 1970s, when the National Institute of Education was in its heyday and education research received more federal funding than it ever has before or since, there was considerable effort devoted to understanding what kinds of teaching actions produced strong learning outcomes". Shulman (1986: 8) argued that "in reading the literature of research on teaching, it is clear that central questions are unasked. The emphasis is on how teachers manage their classrooms, organize activities, allocate time and turns, structure assignments, ascribe praise and blame, formulate the levels of their questions, plan lessons, and judge general student understanding". He said "What we miss are questions about the content of the lessons taught, the questions asked, and the explanations offered. From the perspectives of teacher development and teacher education, a host of questions arise. Where do teacher explanations come from? How do teachers decide what to teach, how to represent it, how to question students about it and how to deal with problems of misunderstanding ?" Research on TMs has enabled substantial progress to be made in curriculum development and reform, educating slow learners, understanding the psychological traits of the physically challenged individuals and in adapting methods of instructions to the needs of individual learners. Research on teaching has rendered an imperative contribution in acquiring information regarding different cultures, norms and values. Formulating Objectives and Hypothesis e. Analyzing and Interpreting the Data c. Deciding the Method of Research f. Writing a Report

Previous Studies
As far as research evaluation is concerned , a lot of work has been done in this field, but none has been done in the TMs research especially in Iraq .The purpose behind reviewing the studies is to find a basis for the present study and shed light on the nature of the problem under study in order to achieve the intended aim "The constant increase in the volume of educational research being published, and the increasing tendency of administrators to rely on research in formulating policy, raises the problem of how best to evaluate what is published. Evaluation is one of the largest problems of the empirical era of education, which is probably only just beginning".
"The evaluation and assessment" of research quality is a very complex task. Due to the subjective nature of the task differences between fields or even among researchers within the same field, it is very difficult to develop a generally accepted research quality assessment tool (Brown, J. R. & Ozgur ,C. ,2018).However, the researcher needs some guidelines for identifying "good research" that are independent of the journal's guidelines in a particular field, and which can be applied to all fields. In other words, the researcher is searching for some underlying principles that will help us to identify "good research." Intensive reading for the following studies help the researcher to develop a set of criteria and guidelines that will hopefully act as a focal point for further discussion and development.
The researcher reviewed thirty-six national and foreign studies. "Some of those studies shared certain aspects and differ in others, among themselves as well as with the current study". were conducted to evaluate educational research articles showed that these articles "had many flaws, such as a lack of systematic and comprehensive literature reviews, absence of a standard research report format, inadequacy in research context description, a deficiency of a prescribed methodology for data collection and analysis, and no explanations of study limitations" . Despite outdatedness of some the literature sources, the researcher makes use of them in present study to achieve the goals he sets. These studies aimed at providing some guidelines (and requirements) for writing a research paper. These guidelines were of vital importance for the researcher because they help him build his coding in evaluating TM research in the current study "The researcher may benefit from these studies in highlighting the similarities and differences related to their methodology, tools, samples, statistical treatments , findings and recommendations" as follows : As it is clear from reviewing the studies, few studies have been done on evaluating educational research and there is hardly any about TMs research , which will strengthen the rationale of conducting the current study and make a new scientific addition in the specialization of teaching methods that may help researchers and academics in further studies.

Method 3.1 Research Design
"A descriptive analytical method was used to conduct the study. This type of research is defined by Brown and Rodgers (2002:118) as "Any research that describes a setting of events in numerical terms" . Content Analysis was conducted to identify to what extent the components ; namely title, abstract , introduction , theoretical background , method , results and discussion , of the TMs articles published in Iraqi Journals match the suggested criteria of evaluation

Population and Sample of the study.
Due to the fact that the population of educational journals are too difficult to access. The researcher purposely selected a sample of ten of Iraqi educational journals accessed from Iraqi Academic Scientific Journals (IASJ) see Table  1. 640 articles are the target population of scholarly TMs articles published in the Iraqi journals during the period from 2015 to 2019 . "The sample was formed by stratifying the population of articles (N= 640 ) by journal, and drawing an 25% sample of articles at random within each stratum (journal), thereby creating a proportionate stratified random sample of 160 articles (see Table 1)"

Instrumentation 3.3.1 The Coding Form
"Because all of the evaluation criteria for nonexperimental studies (i.e., title , abstract , introduction, literature review, and discussion) were included in the criteria for experimental studies, a solo coding form that contains all of the evaluation criteria for both types (see the appendix ) was created. The kinds that are applicable to experimental studies but not to none-experimental inquiries were coded as not applicable (N/A) in this study. The coding form in this study consists of the following categories: Title , Abstract , Introduction, literature review, Method, Results, and Discussion. The introduction is further divided into problem, significance, and theoretical framework. The subsections under literature review are coverage and synthesis. Method contains research design, sampling, instrumentation, data collection procedure, and data analysis. Findings are about the presentation of the results, and discussion includes results, discussion, limitations, and implications". "Determining the number of points on a rating scale is the key to the development of the coding form. Examining previous studies that evaluated the research quality of education research , the researcher chose a five-point scale (very good, good, average, weak, very weak) was used to capture the variation in the degree to which a criterion is met , representing five levels of quality": The number of items suggested in the rating scale were 60. The investigators added 11 items to the original rating scale, 8 that were suggested by jury members and 3 that arose from the researcher personal experience in research consumption.
The 71-item scale includes seven subscales: "To examine the reliability of the content analysis card, the researcher asked for the cooperation of two colleagues to help analyze the study TMs articles."Fifteen articles were randomly selected and coded independently by two researchers. The main aim of this field trial was to test how consistently each researcher interpreted the coding categories so as to revise the rubric later on. . The two raters then read through the coding form together and discussed any questions about the coding categories and the discrepancies.
When inconsistencies or ambiguities were found, the coding categories were modified to remedy those inconsistencies or ambiguities. Most of the coding categories were further divided into smaller and more specific ones, generating 71 subcategories from the original 60 that were tested in the first trial" "A statistical test for this ratio was calculated for each of the five standards and then the researcher calculated the mean of the data of the two cards . Holsti formula was used to determine the reliability . The ratio of agreement between the first and the second analyst for TMs articles was 90.97%, which forms a strong agreement between the researchers". To ensure Reliability through Time , the analysis of 15 articles published in the Iraqi journals were repeated after three weeks .Using Holsti Equation . it was found that "the ratio of agreement between the first and the second rating for TMs articles was 94.06%, which forms a strong coefficient correlation"

Results and Discussion.
To answer the main question of the study "To what extent do components of the TMs articles published in Iraqi Journals match to the suggested criteria for high quality research writing.?" The rating score , mean score , standard deviations , the relative weight, and the level for each criteria were calculated see Table (2):  (2 , 3, 5, 9 ) have achieved a good level , and the standards ((1,4,6,7,8,10) have a very good level . ( for the suggested standards , see the appendix ) 3.The (introduction) component was ranked third with relative weight (88.92%), which is at a very good level .The overall rating score of the introduction is (7825) , the mean (48.906 (, SD (6.631) see Table 2 . The researcher attributes this to the well-organized introduction involved in the Iraqi TMs articles . Introduction section was coped with the standards the researcher developed in the study, where the standards (8,10,11), they are at a good level, and the standards (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9) have a very good level. ( for the suggested standards , see the appendix ) 4.The (discussion) component was ranked fourth with relative weight (88.80%), which is at a very good level and the researcher attributes that to the fact most research articles published in Iraqi TMs journals go in line with the 10 suggested standards , where the standards (4,8,10) have attained a good level and the standards (1,2,3,5,6,7,9) have a very good level ( for the suggested standards , see the appendix ) . The overall rating score of the Discussion is (7104) , the mean (44.400 ( and SD ( 4.826) See Table 2 . This high ranking is due to the concisely presentation of discussion ; it does not exceed 1,500 words including citations. and it includes a "brief statement of the principal findings, a discussion of the validity of the observations, a discussion of the findings in light of other published work dealing with the same or closely related subjects, and a statement of the possible significance of the work". Discussion section interprets the findings and explains patterns in and "the relations among variables with evidence and concrete examples, explains how claims and interpretation address the research problem/issue , explains how claims and interpretations address research questions relates the findings/arguments to the broader problem in the field , indicates unsolved problems , notes the weaknesses of the study , emphasizes implications for theory draws implications for practice and discusses implications for (further) research" 5.The component (abstract ) was ranked fifth with relative weight (82.60%), which is of a good level, and the researcher attributes that to the fact that all 10 suggested standards attain a very good level in the TMs articles published in the Iraqi journals. The overall rating score of the extract section is (6608) , the mean ( 41.300 ( and SD ( 2.933) See Table 2. the standards (2,7 ,8,10) have attained a very good level and the standards (1,3, 4,5,6.9 ) have a good level ( for the suggested standards , see the appendix ) .The researchers follow a systematic way in including all necessary details of the study that capture a reader's interest and summarize the text. Abstracts in Iraqi articles follow core aspects such as reason for conducting the research , theme , purpose , Problem, brief background , methods and outcomes. The researchers determine skillfully how work done being added to the body of knowledge on the topic. 6 .The (Methodology) component was ranked sixth with relative weight (82.51%), and it is at a good level ; The overall rating score of the methodology is (13201) , the mean ( 82.506 ) and SD ( 18.236) See table 2 .The researcher attributes that to the good presentation of methodology .In this section , research writers articulate "its appropriateness: how research design/method relate to research questions or hypothesis" , provide information about samples sufficient for the study , note eligibility and exclusion criterion or special arrangements. This section matches to the suggested standards of a high quality research ; the standards (5, 6,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,18,19,20) Table 4 and the researcher attributes this decreasing level to the lack of comprehensive description literature review ; it does not cover the required reviews of the previous studies and does not justify criteria for inclusion and exclusion from review . Standards (4,5,6) have attained an acceptable level, and the standards (1,2,37,8) have an average level. , ( for the suggested standards , see the appendix )

Interpretation of the Results
The findings of this study indicate that "the overall mean score rise across categories and subcategories of the 160 articles" was 6608 ( rating score ) , 41.300 ( Mean ) , 82.60 relative weight on the 5-point scale , which means that these articles strongly "met the standards". The relative weight of the seven main sections ranged from 51.63% for theoretical literature to 91.82 % for the results see (Table 2 and diagram 1 ) "These relative weight values suggest that the results section appears to be relatively strong compared to the other sections" but still the other sections are strong too . The overall components of TMs articles published in Iraqi journals obtained a relative weight (82.21%), and they are of a good level, and the researcher attributes this to the wide writing experience that Iraqi scholars and writers have gained from communicating with universities, educational institutions and research centers as well as the increase in the number of Iraqi research .( Al Bahadli (2018 ) Encouraging Iraqi scholars to publish in high impact factor journals in order for them to reach an international academic community and encouraging faculty members to write joint research and participate in scientific conference have an effective role in improving the reality of TMs articles . This and others are considered important reasons behind the improvement and upgrading of the TMs articles ( ibid ). "Moreover, These findings show that Iraqi TMs articles usually follow a prescribed methodology of data collection and analysis. Such research practices go in line with modern research ethics that are concerned with systematic procedures in knowledge production (Appadurai, 2000). It is thus very likely for such articles to be accepted or recognized by scholars outside Iraq if they are published in sober journals" . Despite the reality of scientific research in Iraq, which is limited and modest, as Iraq ranks late at the global level according to the indicators used to measure the progress of countries in the field of Subcategories Categories Sections "1.Poses a statement of the problem clearly" 2."Describes a research gap" 3."Supports with rationale" 4.Hypotheses are clearly stated "5.Explains the purpose of the study" 6."States research questions (for qualitative study) or hypothesis that includes variables going to be measured and studied (for quantitative)" "7.Demonstrates theoretical importance of study" "8.Shows practical importance" 9."suggests originality, applicability, and interest to the field" Problem statement Introduction Purpose Significance 10."Describes conceptual or theoretical framework used in the study" "11.Justifies the conceptual or theoretical framework" www.psychologyandeducation.net "5.Justifies eligibility and exclusion criterion or special arrangements" "6.Justifies appropriateness of samples size or number of participants to research Questions" "7.Describes procedures for selecting participants or samples" "8.justifies procedures for selecting participants or samples" "9.Describes instruments or method employed and their purpose in the study" "10.Explains reliability and validity of the instruments or measures" "11.States types of data collected" "12.Describes the ways in which data were gathered or identified" "13.Outlines data collection procedures, including time and duration" "14.Provides the context information (settings or locations) of data gathered" "15.Describes analytic method/techniques" "16.Outlines procedure of data analysis" "17.Clearly describes how analysis procedures address research questions or problem" "18.Makes it clear how analysis procedures conform to research design" "19.Includes information about intended or unintended circumstances that may affect analysis and inferences" "20.Discusses reliability, validity, or trustworthiness  www.psychologyandeducation.net "1.Interprets the findings and explains patterns in the data (document data for nonempirical study) and relations among variables with evidence and concrete examples" "2.Explains how claims and interpretation address the research problem/issue" "3.Explains how claims and interpretations address research questions" "4.Relates the findings/arguments to the broader problem in the field by demonstrating how the conclusions connect to support, elaborate, or challenge those in previous studies" "5.Considers to what extent the results/findings are conclusive and can be generalized" "6.Indicates unsolved problems" "7.Notes the weaknesses of the study"