Comparison of research traditons on these features

Educational researchers have used many research methods, as is evident from manuals such as Cohen and
Manion (1989). Stenhouse (1975) points out that geography, different projections of the earth are usefull
for different purposes large-scale charts use the Mercator projection for crossing seas and oceans and
the Gnomonic projections projections is used for small-scale harbour charts. Both suffer form the error
of representing an irregular spherical surface in two dimensions, but that distortion is quantifiable. Thus
different research methods serve different kinds of problems and different purposes. However, that is not
purely relativist position, for there are general criteria. How do the various research traditions compare?
Hopkins view is as follows (1993: 171) :
Criteria such as validity, reliability, generalizability, are necessary if teacher-researchers are to
escape the sentimental anecdote that often replaces statistical research designs in education, and
gives teacher-research such a bad name. Enquiry, self-monitoring, and teacher-research need to
establish standards and criteria that are applicable to their area of activity, rather than assume (and
then reject) criteria designed for different problems.
Without necessarily subscribing to the view that teacher research is often sentimental anecdote, we can,
however, agree that appropriate standards can be established.
By and large, traditional numerical designs are good on objectivity, reliability, falsifiability, and
replicability, and weaker on interest and originality, context-specificity and utility. Qualitative approaches
are good on interest, originality, sensitivity, context- specificity and validity,they are sometimes thought to
be weaker on falsifiability and generalizability. Recalling the discussion of discrepant case analysis in
the last chapter, it is clear that qualitative designs do not have to be any weaker in falsifiability than
quantitative ones.
Research by participant teachers and action research may be very strong on interest, originality, contextspecificity,validity and utility, but weaker on publication, reliability, and replicability. On publication,
there is often a feeling that this kind of research may accentuate the uniqueness of the situation and play
down the history of the topic as developed in other context. But there is also a danger of re-inventing the
wheel, of unwittingly replicating, without reference to the history of thought which lies behind every
research topic. A quotation from bassey (1986: 24) may illustrate a prevalent attitude: The only reference
to the educational literature is to Ps source of inspiration. There is no tedious reference to queuing theory
or to physiological explanations of fidgeting. Action researchers use the literature only to the extent that
there is something significant and germane to the issue under study : they do not genuflect to Pavlov and
to Piaget in order to impress their readers.
In so far as this quotation puts a higher valuation on relevance and significance, it cannot be criticized:
but the suggestion that a literature search, and the typical literature review that is normally part of
research report, are there to impress the readers cannot go unchallenged. A literature reviews is about
writing the history (briefly,of course) of approaches to a subject and to the methodology of previous
investigations to establish the crucial questions lurking under the surface. It is there to establish the
ancestry and the originality of the new work .

Schecter and Ramirez (1992: 192) discuss their findings after studying a teacher-research group
associated with their university in the USA, by monitoring meetings of the group and analyzing the inhouse reports of their work. It is therefore a kind of meta-analysis. They found a number of important
differences between teacher researchers and university professional researchers. The first of these
concerned the role of the literature search : the university researchers, whatever research tradition they
subscribed to, needed to demonstrate explicitly that their work contributed to an existing body of
knowledge; the teacher researchers, on the other hand, quoted other peoples work on their topics where it
had been useful for them, but without undertaking systematic reviews. The second concerned reliability
and validity judgements, in particular the role of personal experience. For the university researcher, this
would not suffice; for the teacher reseachers, it was regarded more highly, although many also attempted
to support it by other forms of evidence. Third, they found that several pieces of teacher research did not
address a problem but rather took teaching methods and described their implementation and success.
University research usually requires question areas to be painstakingly broken down into crucial problems
or issues which the actual research can be performed on. A further very interesting point made by
Schecter and Ramirez is the difference in standardization of forms of reporting , and that, as teacher
research matures and becomes more widespread, so such standardization of rhetorical forms may
increase. They describe the double narrative, i.e. the description of the research interwoven with the
narrative of the researchers development, and point out that a frequent style of reporting uses this, for the
reason that teacher researchers are strongly aware of the reflexive relationship between the roles of
teacher and researcher,which contrasts with the university researchers claims of objectivity.

Aspects of design of research

It will be evident from the foregoing that there is no simple formula which guarantees good research, and
there is no necessity for research use only one method. In fact there are good reasons to incorporate
several techniques in data-gathering. This allows the opportunity of greater credibility and greater
plausibility of interpretation. For example, a researcher might decide to find out the opinions of a group of
learners about a particular approach thorough a questionnaire, which would elicit easily countable
answers on a range of standard questions, but supplement this either with interviews with a sample of
learners or a content analysis of diaries written at the time of the introduction of the new approach. The
two kinds of data, quantitative and qualitative, may coincide on a number of points, thus strengthening
conclusions drawn from them, and diverge on others. In general, such a procedure is called triangulation
another term taken from geography, referring to finding an unknown position form the intersection of
three compass bearings. Denzin (1978) argues that triangulation takes place in four different areas of the
research effort : combining data sources, using comparisons of theory and individual accounts, using
multiple methods, and several observers where possible. We return to this important concept in part 2. An
obvious example would be as follows: in a small-scale study of student opinion, a researcher might
conduct both a session of individual interviews and a focus group discussion, in order to test the depths of
feeling on particular points and its resistance to change in social interaction. In general,mixing methods of
data collection aids validity.
Methods of analysis may also with profit be mixed, to check on interpretation. In a study of students
learning to write in a second language, a researcher might want to look at the written products both in
terms of the frequencies of certain grammatical and rhetorical structures, and at the global impressions of
comprehensibility recorded by a sample of readers. Some large-scale multimethod studies by academic

researchers have reached the press (for example, bachman and palmer, 1982,on testing: Anderson et al.,
1991, on test-taking strategies). Bearing in mind Schecter and Ramirezs (1992) point about the strength
of the argument from personal experience,it seems that teacher researchers could profitably design into
their research several kinds of data collection and analysis prosedures to test and support their own
convictions from experience.
A further problem in research design of any kind is the nature of any comparisons to be drawn. Purely
descriptive research takes situation and describes it : it sometimes called one-shot research. There may
be a number of possible other comparisons. An example would be a time series in which the development
of a situation over time is charted. Another would be the use of different treatments, either within the
same person or group at different times, like a study of reading strategies for different kinds of text in a
foreign language. In this case, there may be a need to control order effects, so that reading the different
texts is not confused with reading them in a particular order. Another kind of treatment might require two
different groups at the same time, as when two different classes are observed receiving the same lesson.
Yet another kind of treatment comparison might involve two groups receiving different treatments, which
becomes the classic Group A Group B or experimental and control group design.