Ed 510 Applications of Educational Research

How to become a better consumer of published research
 

Knowing more about the design of educational research will help you to accomplish some of the following goals of professional practice:

• apply research to practice
• discriminate sound studies from those that are seriously flawed
• identify aspects of studies that contribute to strong designs and therefore dependable conclusions
• identify aspects of studies that seriously limit one's ability to use or apply research conclusions

 

Merit pay for teachers should be implemented. With merit pay teachers will be more productive and productivity in turn will lead to improved student performance, especially student performance on standardized tests.
 

The argument may or may not be a valid one. Educational research helps us to evaluate arguments like this one in terms of testing the argument.
 

• At first glance there are many more questions than answers embedded in this argument. What are some of the questions that come to mind as you read the statement?

 
• Are you concerned that the argument may be vague, that terms like productivity may not be clearly defined or understood?

 
• Are you concerned that people may have different definitions of productivity or student performance, and therefore discussion will lead to greater ambiguity and confusion?

 
• Are you concerned that some terms, such as student performance, might be tested in ways other than standardized tests, or that tests are only one way to validly assess student performance?

 
• What is meant by improvement?

 
• How many other issues need to be part of any discussion of the relationship between merit pay and teacher productivity, or between teacher productivity and student performance? May be you are concerned that these are not mentioned in the argument as written.

 

Where do the questions that are the basis of educational research studies come from? The answer is that education is both an art and a science and draws its knowledge base from more than one discipline. Education is not a pure discipline, but an applied one. Therefore, the knowledge from many fields is included in its content. This is reflected in the nature of educational research.
 

Consider the following research questions. Each is influenced by either philosophy, sociology, anthropology history, or psychology.
 

• What have been the most influential theories of human knowledge to shape curriculum concepts in science education over the past century?

 
• Will knowledge of the history of public taxation for public schools help officials to avoid policy errors of the past?

 
• Can understanding cultural patterns of behavior aid the use of classroom management strategies?

 
• Does the decay and economic disruption of neighborhoods discourage teachers and administrators from including parent education in the curriculum of their schools?

 

Two paradigms of educational research
 

Paradigms are ways of organizing information so that fundamental, abstract relationships can be clearly understood. In educational research two paradigms guide the design of studies and the ways in which researchers conduct research. One paradigm is qualitative, the other is quantitative.
 

Qualitative research examines issues that are difficult if not impossible to measure. For example, qualitative studies investigate points of view, perspectives, opinion, emotional significance, subjective experience, traditions and mores, customs, and many other connotative and symbolic aspects of human experience. What is key to understanding this approach to research is that qualitative research does not merely study perspective, opinion, etc. Rather it aims to find out more about how people interact with each other, their collective past, their physical and social environment, and the world of foreign experience in terms of connectedness, transaction and social exchange. Even when something as subjective as a point of view is measured, what cannot be measured is how point of view is a way of inter-relating with others who share a similar set of experiences.
 

Thus those who engage in qualitative research tend to avoid measurement and instead look at how meaning is created or interpreted from experience. They use interviews that are open ended and unstructured. They reconstruct the stories of individuals and groups. They use biography. They immerse themselves in the world of their subjects. They observe and record, and question their assumptions. Ultimately the perspectives and meanings of those whom they study is of paramount importance.
 

When we try to understand why urban gangs have social rules and a system of punishment or reward for those who break or follow rules, we are essentially saying that we want to understand more about how members of urban gangs have developed shared meaning about the nature of life in a gang. We are saying that we want to understand their experience from their point of view. Thus we study the problem using qualitative research.
 

Quantitative research
 

When researchers are interested in working through observed information systematically in order to make inferences about relationships in data they are probably going to engage in quantitative research. Quantitative research explores objective relationships, those that can be reproduced time and again just as long as all the conditions from one study to another are kept as constant as possible.
 

Objectivity in the paradigm of quantitative research refers to a researcher's ability to replicate observations and measurements so that findings from one study can be reproduced in subsequent studies. Replication depends upon a number of conditions being met. These include systematic controls of bias, random sampling, the use of control groups, the use of standardized measurement, statistical evaluation of data, and measurement and replicability of the data itself.
 

When a researcher tries to understand why spatial reasoning is a good predictor of performance on tests of mathematical reasoning, that researcher is making assumptions about both the nature of research and the nature of experience that lead to the decision to follow the quantitative paradigm. These would include:
 

• The belief that human ability must be measured in order to be understood objectively;
• The belief that measured phenomena can be replicated without bias, as long as the measuring tools are accurate and consistent;
• The belief that human ability is predictable, and that at some point the lawful nature of these prediction can be understood.

 

• Descriptive - The measurable characteristics of human behavior and ability are described in terms of statistics that report both general tendencies in the data as well as noticeable digressions from typical performance

 
• Correlational - Data is used to demonstrate that there are dependable relationships between two or more measured phenomena. Correlational studies are used to demonstrate associations between variables. They are also used to show that one variable can be used to predict another.

 
• Causal comparative - These studies are used to demonstrate that measured behavior and ability depend, in terms of their measured level, frequency or duration, on one of two things. Either differences in human behavior and ability depend on static conditions, such as gender, socio-economic status, etc.; or these differences can be explained in terms of conditions that are manipulated by a research, such as type of instructional strategy or reward systems.

 

 
 
 
 
 

Describe how you would carry out a qualitative study in which you explore the social adjustment of Cambodian refugee teenagers in an urban high school.
 

Describe how you would set up a prediction study in which you attempt to find out if scores on a standardized test of reading predict social studies grades?
 

Critique your decisions in each example. What were some of the more difficult choices you made?  When were you unsure that you would be able to control biases or evaluate data in a satisfactory way?
 
 

return to the course schedule