Educational Research

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Introduction to Educational
Research EDF 689
 Review
Course requirements
Timeline
Review-Educational Research
– The application of a scientific and disciplined
inquiry approach to the study of educational
problems
Goal
– To explain or help understand educational
issues, questions, or problems
Six ways we can know something
– Tradition
– Expert opinion
– Personal experience
– Intuition
– Logic
Inductive
Deductive
– Research
 Educational Research
Research
– Systematically studying problems using a
scientific and disciplined inquiry approach that
provides detailed descriptions of procedures
Scientific and Disciplined Inquiry

Four general steps

– Identify a topic; an issue or problem that can be
answered through collection an analysis.
– Collect data; describe and execute procedures
– Analyze data; what did you find
– Report the results and implications; this is what I
found and this is why it matters.
Flexibility of these steps to incorporate a
range of purposes and methods
Specific Approaches to Research

Lack of a single, appropriate method to

study education
Family of research methods
– Quantitative
– Qualitative
 Glesne and Peshkin (1994)
suggest that
Quantitative researchers prefer the
measurable
Qualitative researchers prefer, or at
least enjoy, the ambiguous
 Einstein:
Not everything that can be counted
counts, and not everything that counts can
be counted. Albert Einstein, (attributed)
Quantitative Research Designs
make meaning with numbers
Purposes
– Describe current conditions
– Investigate relationships
– Study causes and effects
Four major designs
– Descriptive/survey
– Correlational
– Causal comparative
– Experimental
 Quantitative Designs
Descriptive/survey (continued)
– Characteristics
Use of tests, questionnaires, and surveys
Correlational design (what relationship exists?)

– Purpose – to ascertain the extent to which two or

more variables are statistically related
 Quantitative Designs
Causal-comparative
– Purpose – to explore relationships among variables
that cannot be actively manipulated or controlled by
the researcher
 Quantitative Designs
Experimental
– Purpose – to establish cause and effect
relationships between variables
 Qualitative Designs
Action research
– Purposes
To provide a solution to an educator’s problem in their own
school or organization
To improve practice or understand issues
 Qualitative Designs
Historical research
– Purpose – to gain insight into past events, issues, of
personalities to better understand the current situation
 Qualitative Designs
Ethnography
– Purpose – to obtain an understanding of the shared
beliefs and practices of a particular group or culture
 Qualitative Designs
Grounded theory
– Purpose – to derive theory from the analysis of
identified patterns, themes, and categories emerging
from data