Academic Journals Day 1 ( 13/9 Tuesday) Our first class of the semester. We introduced ourselves.

Introduction of course description and assessment. There are a list of reference book and books to buy. We also had a simple survey for prior knowledge on the course.

Day 2 (14/9 Wed) Introduction to research methodology. Its our first topic learnt today. Miss Asmahan introduced us with research proposal. I need to start finding my topic for research proposal. The idea of doing a research proposal is new for me. Im floating above the cloud, not grasp the idea somehow. Just be sure about lots of reading material to handle.

Day 3 (15/9 Thurs) I checked my notes taken in class. The area of research/study must be within educational field, branching to many sort of discussion. Lecturer adviced us to attend a short course on using library online database. I learnt to use many sorts of academic online journals throughout the workshop. The online database would be our main domain in searching for online academic reference. It was a huge help for us and leapt my motivation of finding a good research topic.

Day 4 (16/9)

I browsed some collection of my books. Student exchange experience last month inspires me to put my focus on technology and education. These two fields of study gained my interest. The learning experience in The State moves my interest to discuss about technology and education. My learning class experience at Ball State University was a unique experience. We actively engaged in technology in and off the class. Computer assisted learning was widely applied in class. The integration of new media with education in class inspired me to have a research on social media and students learning in school. Thats basically how the raw idea is. Im working on the research proposal. I browsed many online website using these two keywords. Many articles achieved. I have made a reference index to record all the reference I had.

Day 5 (17/9) I have little progress on this research. I had programs to attend and many assignments to settle. Only that I checked out the textbooks we bought. I read the content of my thin research textbook written by Dr.Parmjit. It was a good manual for research. I read chapter one and it inspired me with some ideas. I understood how important the research tittle is. It must be precise, accurate and understandable by reader about what the research is about.

Weekly entry (18-24 September) I decided to write this progress as a weekly progress. I missed a lot of entry updates and that does not feel right with me. I changed my research proposal topic. The topic is just not right for me. The first time I consulted my lecturer in the class, she questioned me about the rationale of doing this research and its importance. I realized that in order to do a good

research, I should find a topic that I have deep interest to it. Passion drives researcher to investigate his study and I know I dont really have deep interest towards this topic. I just picked it because I think it is suitable and doable. There is no passionate inside. I think of some topics finally I decided to settle with research topic entitled Teachers burden in administrative task at secondary school and their jobs satisfaction. My mom is a teacher and I have an aunty that also works as a teacher as well. My mom always talked to me about her work at school and the burden teachers had in that school. My mos school is a performance school in Perak and its well known in the state. She complained that they had a really hectic hour in school and limited time to focus in teaching. She said she is fortunate not to have little kids but she pitied her colleagues that have small kids. They always stayed until evening although they are morning session teachers. Sometimes, they will come on weekend to settle work. They have to write many reports, fill in many kind of forms and insert students data in computer or manually written. Thus she said they do more administrative work that it loses their focus to teach students in class. She had thought of transferring to other school. Many of her colleagues get their transferred to other school because they cannot cope with the working environment. The same case happened to my aunty but her situation is not bad as my moms. Thus, with this information I decided to pick this topic as my new research title.

Weekly entry (25-30 September) I worked on my research about this topic. I started from zero again. I found many international journals related to this topic. It was blessing for me because I managed to get many references for this topic. At least there are some researches had been done related to this topic. I kept all these references information in my reference list and saved all the articles founded in my journal collection.

Weekly entry (1-8 October) The journal development was quite good. I managed to find a lot of research paper that are contributed to my topic but most of them are international journals. I still looking forward to local journals that are updated but only found few related to it. My research topic however is not really good where the lecturer suggested me to refine this topic and also the content. It is suggested that I should revised the word administrative task to something that is more close to the meaning of doing clerical work. Besides, it also has weaknesses in term of carrying out this research and participants to join? Their questions are what kind of teachers that will be participated, how to evaluate this research and type of school Im going to do this research. They posted positive comments and critiques. That will help me to investigate more about this topic.

Weekly entry (9-15 October) I had difficulty in understanding qualitative and quantitative research. Those terms are quite technical for me to understand. I know the basic foundation of these terms where one is describing about quality (explanation through words) and the other one describes about the quantity (explanation through numbers). However, there are a lot more about these technical terms in term of the way of choosing qualitative research and quantitative research. Thus, in order to determine what kind of research I would like to do, I have to digest theses terms well enough. On the other hand, I attended a course at Intec library regarding using search engines to find scholarly articles online. That was a really helpful class for me I thought we had it in a really late stage because I believe this kind of class should be started since part2 or part 3 of

study here. The class taught me to use the right way in searching articles, like the criteria to choose when selecting ones. That was just really good because all this while I depended on Google and Google scholar to find all my reference articles.

Weekly entry (16-22 October) The research topic is now at developing stage. I didnt manage to get along with all lecture topics delivered in my class. The presentation about the topic learnt in the research methodology were good but it just too many to swallow in a time. It takes time for me to grasp everything. I preferred to use the thin book (the brown book) as my manual to understand the research concept because it is simple and guided with really good example. I dont really favour the thick white book because it is really thick. I refined my method in reaching my journals. I used SAGE premier and EBESCO as my main search engine. I found many articles and they are all updated. I had difficulties to retrieved Malays journals. I found many outdated journals related to this topic but very few are in updated journals. I collected international journals that are mostly from UK, Taiwan, China, Australia, America and England. These journals are about jobs satisfaction, teachers stress, workload, administrative works etc. I hope there are many fruitful researches on local study on this topic.

Weekly entry (23-31 October) I send a draft of my research to a senior. I hope she can help me to design a good research before I submitted it to my lecturer. I was so nervous to submit it to my lecturer so I had her to check it first. She detected some flaws and weaknesses in this topic and asked me to edit that. She helped what she knows and said its not that much. Thats just a relief to have her

helped me. Then, after do some editing I submit my draft to my lecturer. She approved my topic with many critiques. There a are still many aspects I need to tailor and refine. The literature review is quite week and I had to do more reading on that. The topic title is not good enough, it should be precise and simple. Sheasked me to look for MYTA, NUTP, Ministry of Education websites for further information about my research topic. Besides, I can dig in more information about this issue to my mother and my aunty and see what else I could find. It would help, she said. Im quite relief to have my research topic approved.

Weekly entry (1-5 November) This was quiet a slow progress in my research. I started to tidy up my journal collection and rearranged the item collected so it will be more systematic. I do a filing system in my data collection. I arranged my folder in two part namely local and international source. From these two, I divided each of them into several subfolder according to keywords namely administration task, workload, stress, job satisfaction and burden. I also refined my website source as well. I recorded them in a table form where I arranged them according to title, url address, date retrieved, last check and keywords. This kind of system helps me to get track of my data collection. Oh, not to forget, I had my backup in my pendrive, in case the data in this computer were lost.

Weekly entry (6-12 November) I had a systematic reference table to collect all indings. I decided to adapt some research on this topic. I found some interesting journals that were studying about this issue. There are three journals from local and international journals. The researchers are Salam, Saudi and

Chen (Taiwan). I think by combining several aspects they had on their research will help me to design a suitable research for myself. Thus, I decided to combine and adapted the approaches, focus and elements of study and tailored them to suit in my research topic. The only flaw about the references is that they are quiet outdated. Im not sure if my lecturer would accept outdated source as my reference research.

Weekly entry (13-19 November) Almost little progress to my research topic. I learnt about SPSS system. It taught us how to design statistic data and do analysis using this system. It was quite complicated. We had handouts and the teaching is useful not for now, but later in my research. I refined my title. The new topic is A study on Teachers Workload in Shah Alam Secondary School and the effects towards teachers. I think it is good but who knows if it is the worst topic ever.

Weekly entry (20-26 November) I learnt many things in my class however I missed a lot of thing in the class. During this week, I really put focus on self reading about research topics. I learnt and understand the importance element in this study. The most basic is background of study, then methodology of research and finally the literature review. I also increased my reading activities on academic journals and articles to comprehend my understanding about this topic. Weekly entry (27-30)

I only do website review on article and reading. I printed them to ease my reading activities and with me, there is a notebook to scribble any notes or information I would want to highlighted with the title and page so then I can check it again when I want to.

Weekly entry (1-10 December) The week is really busy to do any updates. I hardly have a fruitful activities on research. The only thing I do is downloaded APA format style book from internet and read the manual.

Weekly entry (11-17 December) I had my research topic arranged according to the design in research. I dont really write anything yet but I prepared the ingredients for the chapter (chapter 1,2 and 3). It is like a detailed draft I prepared for writing my research proposal. Its really tedious process.

Weekly entry (18-23 December) The hellish week for me. There were many things to write actually. 8,000 words is exactly like a thesis proposal and I am worried of writing a good research proposal. I am quite confused of deciding what should and should not be in the research proposal. I burned the midnight oil to finish writing the proposal. I hope it will be suitable for my AE. I finished writing the proposal and its nerve wrecking to submit the final product of my research proposal.