There are multiple different ways of teaching a stand alone mixed methods research course at the graduate level with one of the major textbooks, including my own An Introduction to Fully Integrated Mixed Methods Research. These are generally organized with separate sections devoted to planning, data collection, data analysis, integration, and quality.

The choice of a final assignment in the course is critical to help integrate and apply some of what they’ve learned. 

FINAL ASSIGNMENT

There are several approaches to an integrative assignment that are used frequently when teaching MMR. Probably the most frequent is the requirement to develop a proposal for a research project incrementally over the course of the semester. I found this to be extremely labor intensive, difficult to compress into a single semester, and that many of the students were not at a point in their coursework where they were ready to do this. 

An approach I suggest is a research paper with a methodological focus. It requires introducting the skills of content analysis of a set of published MMR research articles. I reviewed content analysis  in four pages in my textbook, An Introduction to Fully Integrated Mixed Methods Research. Content analysis is often done with a qualitative approach but it combine qualitative and quantitative analysis. A straighforward way to do this is to have students select an element of the research method to pursue in-depth and then to conduct a search on the Journal of Mixed Methods website to locate articles to explore different approaches to that topic. One distinct advantage of searching JMMR is that transparency about research methods is generally quite high. 

This assignment allows each student to carve out a specialized expertise in MMR. It can provide the first step of a larger project. Examples of topics related to research methods in MMR that can be pursued with content analysis include:

1. One of the principal philosophical orientations used with MMR: pragmatism, dialectical pluralism, critical realism, or transformative/emancipatory.
2. MMR that acknowledges an equal priority.
3. Qualtiatively oriented MMR. 
4. Mixed methods grounded theory (MM-GT)
5. Mixed methods case study
6. Joint displays
7. Mixed analysis
8. Concurrent research design
9. Sequential research design

Rather than a single, final due date for the whole research paper, it can be broken it smaller chunks.

1. A reference list of research articles that will be reviewed.
2. A draft of a protocol for coding articles systematically.
3. A spreadsheet with an initial set of data.
4. Preliminary draft of tables.
5. Draft of the manuscript.