Identifying impediments to learning can help both instructors and students. In this study students (N = 222) from across the nation listed concepts from research methods they found the most challenging—“potholes” or impediments to learning, and also rated the difficulty of various concepts from the class. We also measured student attitudes and perceptions of the course. Our results showed validity is one of the hardest concepts for students to understand in RM. Not surprisingly, within a list of concepts in research methods, students tend to be tripped up by terms of similar grouping. Perceptions of a research methods course was strongly related to the students’ attitudes and canonical correlation analysis revealed several important findings from our data set. For example, we found that when students perceive more value, expectancy for success, cognitive strategies, and resources management strategies, they are less likely to be challenged by the concepts of samples and variables and threats to internal validity. Our findings provide a clear map of student potholes in research methods courses and suggest ways to change student attitudes about the same.

找出学习障碍可以对教师和学生都有帮助。在这项研究中，学生（N= 222），他们从研究方法中列出了一些概念，他们发现最具挑战性的“障碍”或学习障碍，并且还评估了课堂上各种概念的难度。我们还测量了学生对课程的态度和看法。我们的结果表明，有效性是让学生理解RM的最难概念之一。毫不奇怪，在研究方法的概念列表中，学生倾向于被类似的分组绊倒。研究方法课程的认知与学生的态度密切相关，典型的相关分析揭示了我们数据集的一些重要发现。例如，我们发现，当学生认识到更多的价值，对成功的期望，认知策略和资源管理策略时，他们不太可能受到样本和变量概念以及内部有效性威胁的挑战。我们的发现为研究方法课程中的学生坑坑洼洼提供了清晰的地图，并提出了改变学生态度的方法。