Introduction to Educational Research
Making a decision about teaching.
• What is one decision you have made recently in your
teaching?
• How did you make this decision?
• What evidence did you use?
• How did you know it was a good decision?
• How many times do you have to make a decision in your
teaching?
• What does it mean to use “experience” in this context?
ALL aspects of teaching and learning are
RESEARCH issues.
Good teaching involves ongoing action research:
• Observations from ones' own experience and those of
others (formal and informal),
• process modelling,
• hypothesising and experimenting (purposeful change),
• data collection and analysis,
• modification and refinement of models,
• all leading to a new cycle of reflection and action.
ALL aspects of teaching and learning are
RESEARCH issues.
• For most good teachers this occurs almost
subconsciously. Knowledge about teaching and learning
is generally implicit.
• Making the implicit explicit is the basis of much
education research.
• Detailing, explaining, and organising the process in a
way others can understand and follow leads to new
insights for one's own practice and assists the action
research of others.
ALL aspects of teaching and learning are
RESEARCH issues.
• Impressions are not data.
• Guesses are a poor basis for changes that may influence
people’s lives.
• Idiosyncratic new strategies may do damage to some or
many of the students. What other choices are there?
• Does a new strategy actually work, and how will you
know?
• How do you monitor a new strategy to make continuous
improvements?
Identifying a research question
• Personal experience: “that’s odd” moment
• Observations: realising something over time, and
wondering why
• Investigation: reading reveals something inconsistent.
• Conversation with others: shows up variations in
practice or experience.
Is the truth out there?
• How you approach your research will reflect how you see
the world and the knowledge within in: your
Epistemology.
Two perspectives on knowledge.
Positivist
• A perspective that defines knowledge as something that
exists independently in the world, and can be discovered
through careful observation.
• Since it exists independently, knowledge is verifiable and
stable.
Two perspectives on knowledge.
Interpretivist (constructivist)
• A perspective that defines knowledge as dependent upon
human perception, and thus as never free from such
influences as culture, history and belief.
• Because perceptions vary, multiple realities exist
simultaneously.
Quantitative Mode
Qualitative mode
Assumptions
Assumptions
 Social facts have an objective reality
 Primacy of method
 Variables can be identified and relationships
measured
 Etic (outside's point of view)
Purpose
 Generalisability
 Prediction
 Causal explanations
 Reality is socially constructed
 Primacy of subject matter
 Variables are complex, interwoven, and difficult
to measure
 Emic (insider's point of view)
Purpose
 Contextualization
 Interpretation
 Understanding actors' perspectives
Quantitative Mode
Qualitative mode
Approach
Approach
 Begins with hypotheses and theories
 Manipulation and control
 Uses formal instruments
 Experimentation
 Deductive
 Component analysis
 Seeks consensus, the norm
 Reduces data to numerical indices
 Abstract language in write-up
Researcher Role
 Detachment and impartiality
 Objective portrayal
 Ends with hypotheses and grounded theory
 Emergence and portrayal
 Researcher as instrument
 Naturalistic
 Inductive
 Searches for patterns
 Seeks pluralism, complexity
 Makes minor use of numerical indices
 Descriptive write-up
Researcher Role
 Personal involvement and partiality
 Empathic understanding
Axioms About
Positivist Paradigm (Quantitative)
Naturalist Paradigm (Qualitative)
The nature of reality
Reality is single, tangible, and
fragmentable.
Realities are multiple, constructed, and
holistic.
The relationship of
knower to the known
Knower and known are independent, a Knower and known are interactive,
dualism.
inseparable.
The possibility of
generalization
Only time- and context-bound working
Time- and context-free generalizations
hypotheses (idiographic statements) are
(nomothetic statements) are possible.
possible.
The possibility of
causal linkages
All entities are in a state of mutual
There are real causes, temporally
simultaneous shaping, so that it is
precedent to or simultaneous with their
impossible to distinguish causes from
effects.
effects.
The role of values
Inquiry is value-free.
Inquiry is value-bound.
Research with Subjects (Quantitative)
Research with Informants (Qualitative)
1. What do I know about a problem that will allow
me to formulate and test a hypothesis?
1. What do my informants know about their culture
that I can discover?
2. What concepts can I use to test this hypothesis?
2. What concepts do my informants use to classify
their experiences?
3. How can I operationally define these concepts?
3. How do my informants define these concepts?
4. What scientific theory can explain the data?
4. What folk theory do my informants use to explain
their experience?
5. How can I interpret the results and report them in
the language of my colleagues?
5. How can I translate the cultural knowledge of my
informants into a cultural description my colleagues
will understand?