I decided to teach my G12 cousin some SHS courses in advance, as I have taught them before. But if there is anything I dislike about it, it's this:

Practical Research 1 and 2 are both very problematic and should be revamped.

Why are those two SHS courses problematic?

1. If you look at the course guides, the topics focus on the different parts of the research paper and how they can write them. There seems to be little room to discuss the different qualitative/quantitative methods.

In fact, in her experience with Practical Research 1, my cousin didn't fully understand what content analysis, ethnography, historical analysis, discourse analysis, etc were. She also said that they never really read any studies (or excerpts of studies) that use those methods.

This brings me to my second point.

2. Students are asked to write a paper as a requirement in both courses. I mean, they have just started exploring those methodologies. Hindi fair na susugod agad sila sa pananaliksik kahit na hindi pa fully grasped ang mga research concepts.

In short, I would have hoped that Practical Research 1 and 2 were instead opportunities to read up and assess published studies. Ang hirap kasi minsan ay porket may performance task (PETA) ay papel na agad ang hinihingi.

That's misunderstanding what PETAs are about.

3. Lastly, the curriculum suggests that we can concretely divide research methodology into a dichotomy: qualitative/quantitative.

This is pretty misleading, because in reality, you are doing both. Qualitative findings have quantitative basis and vice versa.

So there. I have other complaints about those two courses, but it's important that we revamp them. Otherwise, I fear our education systems are doing a huge disservice to our students and they don't know it.

I should try writing up on this soon.