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RESEACH
Research isn’t only done in the science field or the mathematical field. It is also done in the educational field. Research is conducted to collect and analyze data to help improve the educational field. Research in the education field is performed in order to see students learning, teaching methods, teacher training, classroom dynamics, and many other things. In the educational field, many research methods exist, but IDT Master program explored 2, educational research and action research.
Educational research
Why Education research?
Research helps with decision making. When doing research, you are using evidence-based findings to assess programs, techniques, and policies. Educational research is systematic approach toward gathering, analyzing, and reporting data addressing educational problems and questions.
How does it work?
One of the main goals for educational research is to obtain credible answers to a research question. Research involves approximately four steps broken into smaller ones: question, method, result, and conclusion. There are two research methods and depending on who is doing the research and the purpose of it, you either doing a traditional research or action research.
What types of educational research methods are there?
Traditional (Basic, Applied, and Evaluation) and Action Research
- Traditional Research: To understand theories or practices, explain theories or practices, goal to make judgments on theories or practices, or use results to test theories or practices.
- Basic research: uses results for development of theories. “understanding and explaining.”
- Applied research: use results to test theories and other ideas that affects or is occurring in the educational settings.
“Problems that needs to be solved.”
- Evaluation research: helps making decisions about the effectiveness or desirable of a program. “goal to make judgments
about alternatives situations.”
- Action Research: To solve specific issues, improve practices, or help make decision at single sites. "Intent is to improve practice."
Types of methodology for the research process
Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research design.
Quantitative: research done objectively
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Experimental
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Quasi-experimental
Qualitative: research done stressing view and perception
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Phenomenological study
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Ethnography
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Grounded theory
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Case studies
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Critical studies
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Narrative inquires
Mixed method: uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches.
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Explanatory sequential
What to expect?
When beginning to conduct an educational research, the first thing you need to have is a research problem. The research problem provides the context for why the study is important. The research problem should be a general topic that ends with a more specific statement of purpose. From there, you can decide which educational research method you can use.
Action Research
What is action research?
According to Craig Mertler, “action research is define as any systematic inquiry conducted by teachers, administrators, counselors, or others with a vested interest in the teaching and learning process or environment for the purpose of gathering information about how their particular school operate, how they teach, and how their students learn” (Mertler, 5).
How does it work?
In the educational field, there is always a problem that’s being observed or there are new teaching strategies that we want to implement. Conducting an action research enables the opportunity to either tackle the problem or try new strategies while analyzing the data. Action research consist of many stages.
First is the planning stage, the phase where you decide what you want to study and the reason behind the study. Once you have made your decision what you want to research, you need to limit the research. By limiting your research your creating a specific question.
The second stage is gathering information. Once you have created your research question, you begin to gather information regarding the research questions by interviewing subject matter experts and exploring ideas that are related to the question.
The third stage consist of reviewing the literature. This is the phase where you analyze as much research that there is regarding your question. You look at the research to form an idea of how you want to approach your question. The literature review will guide your decisions and helps you develop your research plan and focus points.
The fourth step is developing your research plan. This is where you decide how you want to collect the data (research methodology) and what is necessary to develop your research design. In this phase, you develop your hypothesis based on your research question. This is where you can also use an instructional design to help you with your research plan and implementation. Also, in this phase you identify your variables that are essential to the research question and hypothesis. By identifying the variables of your research it enables the opportunity to choose with methodology method to use in order to collect your data and analyze it. There consist of three different methodology methods for collecting data, the qualitative data, quantitative data, and mixed methods. By collecting qualitative data, you are either doing observations, interviews, journals, etc. By collecting quantitative data, you are either doing surveys, checklists, assessments, etc. Mixed methods consist of both ways of collecting data. While working on this step, you also make the decision on how will you measure your variables. In this phase, you also work on establishing your participants and which basic research design will you be using.
The fifth step is the step in which you implement the plan and collect the data. This is the action stage, it’s where you put everything into play. This is where you conduct your research and collect the data.
The six step is the phase where you analyze the data that you collected. To analyze your data, you can use descriptive statistics or inferential statistics. While analyzing you data, you will most likely be answering your research questions.
The seventh step consist of developing an action plan. In this plan, you outline your findings and make any adjustments to your hypothesis.
The eight step consist of sharing and communicating your results. This is the step where you put all your information together and present it to your peers.
The last step is the reflection process. This is where you reflect on what the research has shown and make any adjustments to your findings. Also, you can revise your question and redo the action plan.
Resource: Mertler, C. A. (2020). Action research: Improving schools and empowering educators. SAGE Publications, Inc.
Traditional Research
What is traditional research?
“Traditional educational research is generally conducted by researchers or scientists from outside the organization looking in whose goal is to remain objective and offer generalized truths” (DocBonBon 2014). Traditional research can be categorized into three or more subdivisions, which include basic research, applied research, and evaluation research.
How does it work?
In the educational field, many individuals outside the classrooms or schools want to see if certain learning theories or practices are effective in the learning environment. Conducting traditional research can assist and generalize any findings. Traditional research consist of many steps.
The first step is identifying the problem or research topic. This is the step where you choose what topics or problems you want to conduct your researched.
The second step is reviewing the literature. In this step, you search and survey other research related to the topic/problem. With the research at hand, you can form an idea on how to approach the topic/problem.
The third step is the part where you design the study. This is the part where you decide where and how you want to conduct the experiment/study. Also in this step, you decide which mythological method you want to use in order to gather your data. Because you are outside the classroom and school, there are other steps you need to follow to conduct the research experiment. In this process, you need to figure out how to identify your control and experimental group.
The fourth step is to analyze the data. Once the study/research has been conducted, the data can be analyze. In this step you can use statistics to analyze the data.
The fifth step is to interpret the data that has been analyzed. In this step, you use the data to create your conclusion.
Lastly, you report your findings.
Reflection
Throughout my journey at IDT Master program, I was introduced to educational research, which branch out to action research and traditional research. Both action and tradtional research help explore the process of conducting a systematic research in order to bring change to learning environment or introduce new teaching methods to the classroom.
Resources:
DocBonBon. (2014, April 13). PDH education. PDH Education. Retrieved November 21, 2021, from
https://pdhed.com/2014/04/13/action-research-or-traditional-experimental-research/.
Action research. Action Research versus Traditional Research. (n.d.). Retrieved November 21, 2021, from
https://go.valenciacollege.edu/faculty/development/teaching-learning-academy/action-research/ARP_softchalk/ARP_softchalk2.html.