Education and Educational Research: An Overview
Education research is a systematic collection and analysis of evidence and data related to the field of education. As a student, teacher, or administrator, consider how many times you have heard, “evidence-based practice” or “according to the research.” It seems that every new idea in education is research-based, but what does that really mean? In an increasingly data-driven society, it is vital that educators know how to locate, find, and interpret research on their own. Further, educators need to be able to conduct quality research to examine issues within their own contexts.
The Essence of Educational Research
Educational research is the scientific field of study that examines education and learning processes, the human attributes, interactions, organizations, and institutions that shape educational outcomes. Scholarship in the field seeks to describe, understand, and explain how learning takes place throughout a person’s life and how formal and informal contexts of education affect all forms of learning. Education research embraces the full spectrum of rigorous methods appropriate to the questions being asked and also drives the development of new tools and methods.
The Research Process: A Cyclical Journey
The research process is a cyclical process of steps that typically begins with identifying a research problem or issue of study. It then involves reviewing the literature, specifying a purpose for the study, collecting and analyzing data, and forming an interpretation of information. This process culminates in a report, disseminated to audiences, that is evaluated and used in the educational community. Educators need to be consumers (and producers) of research.
The Importance of Research for Educators
Research is important, particularly to educators, for numerous reasons:
- Research can suggest ways of improving practice that have been verified with many applications and by many different types of people, which is difficult for practitioners.
- Research can add to what we know about how people learn and what we can do to help facilitate the learning process.
- Research can address areas in which little is known, like perhaps the effects of online versus traditional classroom learning.
- Research can allow us to extend what we know in ways we never conceived.
- Research can act as a test to verify previous findings.
- Research can add an important perspective for different learning types. Much of the educational research prior to the Eighties is based on able, white, middle-to-upper class males.
Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methods
Briefly, get used to using the following words: quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods.
Read also: What makes a quality PE curriculum?
- This type of research design is best for “What?” questions.2.
- This type of research design is good for any questions you can think of, particularly those that can’t be answered easily with numbers alone.
Primary vs. Secondary Sources
The final emphasis point in this brief introduction is fundamental to your understanding as a soon-to-be consumer/producer of research. Where most introductory students struggle is in distinguishing primary and secondary sources. We’ll return to this later, but to be sure we are clear from the beginning.
Empirical research implies that the study is original and stresses systematic observation. Journal articles and other types of peer-reviewed sources (such as academic conference papers) are the main venue for empirical research. These first publications of empirical research are also referred to as primary sources. In academic settings, you are generally only to use primary sources.
If nothing else, you can visually tell that periodicals, such as newspapers, magazines, online weekly reports (such as Education Week), or even textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias (like Wikipedia) are much different. The usual tip is that these types of publications have advertisements, where journal articles generally do not. These are all secondary sources. You might see references to research, but the actual report is in a journal article, as above. You are generally not to use secondary sources.
Approaches to Educational Research
Educational researchers generally agree that research should be rigorous and systematic. However, there is less agreement about specific standards, criteria, and research procedures. As a result, the value and quality of educational research has been questioned. There are different approaches to educational research.
The pursuit of information that can be directly applied to practice is aptly known as applied or contractual research. Researchers in this field are trying to find solutions to existing educational problems. The basis for educational research is the scientific method. The scientific method uses directed questions and manipulation of variables to systematically find information about the teaching and learning process.
Read also: Maximize Savings on McGraw Hill Education
In this scenario, questions are answered by the analysis of data that is collected specifically for the purpose of answering these questions. Hypotheses are written and subsequently proved or disproved by data which leads to the creation of new hypotheses. Qualitative research uses the data which is descriptive in nature.
There also exists a new school of thought that these derivatives of the scientific method are far too reductionist in nature. Since educational research includes other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, science, and philosophy and refers to work done in a wide variety of contexts it is proposed that researchers should use "multiple research approaches and theoretical constructs." This could mean using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods as well as common methodology from the fields mentioned above. Since educational issues are of many different kinds and logical types, it is to be expected that quite different types of research should be brought into play on different occasions.
Educational research can also be organized by the subject or object of focus, as in school, teacher, student, etc., the relationship between actors such as student-teacher, teacher-principal, school-home, etc.
Replicability in Educational Research
In response to increased attention to the replicability of experimental findings in the sciences and medicine, in 2014, Educational Researcher published a review of the entire publication history of the 100 education journals with the highest five-year impact factors that found that out of 164,589 articles published only 221 articles (or 0.13 percent) were attempted replications of previous studies. Only 28.5 percent of the replication studies were direct replications rather than conceptual replications (i.e. usage of a different experimental method to test the same hypothesis). 48.2 percent of the replications were performed by the same research team as produced the original study, and when the same research team published the replication studies in the same journals, 88.7 percent of replications were successful while only 70.6 percent were successful when published in a different journal.
Result-Blind Peer Review
As of December 2021, among more than 300 other psychology and medical journals, the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, the British Journal of Educational Psychology, the Canadian Journal of School Psychology, Exceptional Children, Frontiers in Education, the Gifted Child Quarterly, the Journal for the Education of the Gifted, the Journal of Advanced Academics, the Journal of Cognition and Development, the Journal of Educational Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, JMIR Medical Education, the Journal of Numerical Cognition, the Journal of Research in Reading, Language Learning, Learning and Instruction, Mind, Brain, and Education, and Scientific Studies of Reading have adopted result-blind peer review.
Read also: Becoming a Neonatal Nurse
tags: #education #and #educational #research #overview
