Texas State University - San Marcos

Administrative Assistant, Political Science

Masters Public Administration Program

About

Texas State University Master of Public Administration Program is known for the quality of its student research. Five student papers have won the prestigious national Phi Alpha Alpha (best master’s student paper in Public Affairs and Administration) award. These awards were presented at the conference of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration.  Twenty five papers have won the McGrew Award for student research from the Central Texas Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration. In addition Texas State faculty (Shields and Tajalli) have been recognized nationally and regionally for the quality of the papers through teaching awards.  A complete list of the award winning papers can be found at http://mpa.polisci.txstate.edu/student-resources/awards.html. In addition, the papers are cited in journal articles, books, policy reports, dissertations and master’s theses. See an article in the Journal of Public Affairs Education for more information. http://txstate.academia.edu/PatriciaShields/Papers/1402348/Open_Access_Digital_Repository_Sharing_Student_Research_with_the_World .

The Texas State MPA Program uses a unique and recognized method to supervise student research developed by Patricia Shields and Hassan Tajalli. There are several articles, papers and a book that explain the system used at Texas State. Perhaps most importantly, the system of writing papers is informed by the pragmatism and theory of inquiry of John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. See the 1998 article by Patricia Shields for a discussion of the philosophy of science behind these papers “Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Science: A Tool for Public Administration.” (http://ecommons.txstate.edu/polsfacp/33/).
Note that the Shields and Shields and Tajalli papers are available on the Shields page of Academia.edu and through the links on this page.

The papers are written during a two-course sequence. In the first course students are required to come up with their research question/purpose, write a literature review, develop a conceptual framework, operationalize the conceptual framework and present a research prospectus. In the second course, students work independently with the professor that taught the first class. Papers are defended during an oral exam.

The students use two “pragmatism” inspired tools of inquiry to do this. One known as the Step-by-Step notebook transforms writing a paper into organizing a project. Time, materials and ideas are organized through the notebook. The paper “Enhancing the quality of student papers” http://ecommons.txstate.edu/polsfacp/5/) provides an explanation of the system.  Students actually use the Shields book/workbook STEP BY STEP: Building a Research Project (New Forums Press 2002) to organize their literature review. The Step-by-Step notebook provides an outer order, which enables the deeper reflective and creative thought needed for the transformations in understanding that accompany the writing of a quality research paper. The second tool ( 5 unique Conceptual frameworks) used by students at Texas State provide a kind of intermediate theory which enables students to coherently bridge the research purpose, theory, method, data collection and organization of findings. Discussions of the conceptual frameworks and their link to Dewey and Peirce can be found in the Shields “Philosophy of Science” paper. A  detailed discussion and application of the five conceptual frameworks is found in the 2006 Shields and Tajalli article in the Journal of Public Affairs Education “Intermediate Theory: The Missing Link to Successful Student Scholarship” http://ecommons.txstate.edu/polsfacp/39/ .

Texas State University Master of Public Administration students often hold important positions in Texas State and local government. From their vantage point as student practitioners they can see and explore many issues important to public administration.

In 2006, the Texas State MPA Program began to post the Applied Research Projects to an open access institutional repository (http://ecommons.txstate.edu/arp/ ). Papers from this repository have been uploaded to Academia.edu. We hope members of the academia.edu community find the papers and the process of producing the papers informative. 

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