Understanding Research in Education

Becoming a Discerning Consumer

Fred L. Perry Jr., Joe D. Nichols

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138776425
• eBook ISBN: 9781317680659
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text provides a solid introduction to the foundations of research methods, with the goal of enabling students and professionals in the various fields of education to not simply become casual consumers of research who passively read bits and pieces of research articles, but discerning consumers able to effectively use published research for practical purposes in educational settings. All issues important for understanding and using published research for these purposes are covered. Key principles are illustrated with research studies published in refereed journals across a wide spectrum of education. Exercises distributed throughout the text encourage readers to engage interactively with what they are reading at the point when the information is fresh in their minds. This text is designed for higher level undergraduate and graduate programs. Course instructors will find that it provides a solid framework in which to promote student interaction and discussion on important issues in research methodology.

PART I

Fundamentals for Discerning Consumers

1

UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF RESEARCH

Introduction

The amount of research in education pouring off of the presses today is staggering. Over 4,100 people presented papers in 296 areas of educational research at the 2013 American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting. The authors of many of these papers will try to publish them in various research journals. The number of journals that publish research related to the many areas of education is beyond listing. Can you imagine how many research studies are published just this last year?

So what is all this research about? Who is it for? Is it important, and if so, how can we understand it better? Briefly, we will answer these questions, but the main purpose of this book is to answer the last question—how can we comprehend it all?

What Is All This Research About?

A quick answer is that research tries to provide answers to massive numbers of research questions that are being generated around the world in the areas of education. As mentioned above, there were 296 subject areas covered in the 2013 AERA annual meeting. The list is too long to present here, but you can get this at http://www.aera.net. Suffice it to say that research in the field of education covers topics that deal with just about anything related to education in society.

Who Is All This Research for?

It is for you, the person who, for whatever reason, wants or needs to gain a better understanding about educational issues that are important to you. This includes the following:

• Students working on their Masters or PhDs.

• Teachers in the classroom or working on advanced certificates.

• Administrators in the school systems.

• Parents of students who want to know more about what is impacting their children in the school systems.

Is All of This Research Really That Important?

Needless to say, education is the major way of maintaining society. Without it we would not know the world as we know it today. Literally everything that humanity has achieved would not have taken place without some form of education. Consequently, to study all that is involved in education is one of the major challenges that we believe we continually have before us today. Educational research has aided us in the improvement of teaching and learning of many studies throughout the world. Mankind’s main hope is that this will contribute to humanity’s understanding of one another and our environment to improve the quality of life and work toward an atmosphere of world peace.

If Educational Research Is so Important, How Can We Understand it Better?

This book is specifically designed to answer this question. We have divided it into two parts. The first consists of this chapter and Chapter 2, which will provide you with a foundation for working with the remaining chapters. This chapter introduces the concept of the discerning consumer and the meaning of research. The second chapter gives tools for finding research reports based on your own interests. Quickly mastering these simple guidelines will make accessible a wealth of information that can have a major impact on your career.

The chapters in Part II of the book are structured around the typical format used in published research. In them you will be given a set of criteria to evaluate each component of a research study. For each criterion, you are given excerpts from published research to illustrate how it is used for evaluation. By the end of the book, you should be able to approach any published study in education with confidence to not only understand it, but to evaluate its value for practical applications.

Overview

This chapter attempts to lay a foundation in building a framework for understanding a typical research study. We begin by defining the term discerning consumer and then argue for the importance of becoming one. This is followed by an attempt to demythologize how research is perceived by many people and then describe what it typically means to the educational community. In this description, a schematic understanding of the driving force behind research, the research question, is provided. With this perspective, you will be ready for the following chapters.

Who Is a Discerning Consumer of Research?

The term consumer in the business world means a customer—someone who buys and uses a product. In a similar fashion, readers of research are consumers in that they use research for specific purposes. To some degree, the readers of research might buy into the research product, if not actually pay money to obtain access to the research study.

There are two basic types of consumers: casual and discerning. Casual consumers are ones who passively read selective pieces of a research article out of curiosity. In the business world, they are the window shoppers who look, but do not buy. However, discerning consumers do more than window-shop. They want to use research for practical purposes; they want to read research reports from beginning to end with a level of understanding that can be used to address both theoretical and practical issues. We use the word discerning in two senses: penetrating and discriminating. In the first sense, discerning consumers are given the necessary tools to penetrate beyond the surface of the text to analyze the rationale behind the procedures used and the interpretations made. In the second sense, discerning consumers are able to discriminate between strong and weak research studies by applying the criteria that they will study in this book to make value judgments.

However, by discerning consumers, we do not mean hypercritical consumers. The key word here is discernment, not fault finding. We do not want readers to become cynics who delight in slamming researchers on every little perceived weakness and group all research as worthless. Rather, discerning consumers are ones who have self-confidence in their own ability to gauge research so that they can evaluate the influence that a study should have on practical issues of concern. When this objective is reached, research journals will no longer be looked upon as forbidding, boring documents that only university professors dare to read. Rather, they will be regarded as important sources of evidence or counter evidence that can be used in arguing the pros and/or cons of implementing new ideas and methodologies in our schools and classrooms.

Why Be a Consumer of Research?

Many students, teachers, and administrators are looking for practical information that will help them in their studies, teaching, or program development, respectively. They want immediate and practical information that they can use. They want to know how to teach various subject areas. They want to know what materials to use, what method works best.

However, there is no one way to teach. There is no one set of materials that can be used in every situation. We must make decisions, and these decisions must have some rationale for support. We must decide what, how, and when to teach based on the needs of the learner. We need to know how the learner thinks and feels, and what the best time is for teaching certain material via a certain methodology. To make these decisions, we must gather information, and this information is obtained through reading and doing research.

Unfortunately, we have seen many people in education over the years jump on various bandwagons regarding what to teach, how to teach, and how the learner acquires information and behavior. We have seen various charismatic experts sway audiences to accept their viewpoint as if it were the absolute truth. However, when the content of what was said was examined, little solid evidence was provided to back up the conjectures. Yet the audience pours out of the conference doors, back to their institutions, heralding the latest jargon, thinking that they have come on the most revolutionary thing they have ever heard. Programs are changed, new curricula are developed, and training sessions in new methodologies are imposed on the faculty. Yet have we really advanced in our discipline?

To avoid wasting time, money, human energy, and to prevent being led down the garden path, we argue that we must attend to what is happening in research. Yes, this will slow things down. People will become frustrated that they must wait for answers. They want quick solutions to their problems. An answer might never be forthcoming. What then? My response is that if we are unable to see some results based on careful research to guide us, we had better not take this route. Money in education is too limited to go out on wild goose chases to find out 5 years down the road that the latest fad was a waste of time.

Or maybe one wants to prepare a summary of research on a given topic in order to get a better picture of the state of affairs. Decisions must be made as to which set of research studies best fit the purposes of their endeavor.

In either of the above scenarios, we must learn to read research in education with a discerning eye. The purpose of this book is to help do exactly this: guide you in becoming a discerning consumer.

The Motivation Behind Research

To become a discerning consumer, we need to have a clear understanding of the driving force behind the research process. However, we require a working definition of the meaning of research first. Today it has many meanings, but much of what is called research would not be considered so by the scientific community. The purpose of this section is to explain how most professional researchers understand research by making contrasts with more commonly used definitions of research.

Demythologizing Research

Research Does Not Mean Searching for Articles to Write Papers

Probably the most common misconception about research is confusing it with papers we were asked to write back in secondary school or during our undergraduate days at the university—projects often referred to as research papers. Typically, such assignments mean that students go to the library and (re)search for a number of articles from a variety of sources. Then, they integrate the gathered information from these articles through summarizing and paraphrasing into papers addressing issues of importance with correct footnoting and referencing. However, the skills used in writing such papers, although important to research, should not be regarded as research.

The fact is consumers of research will spend most of their time in this searching activity. Even researchers have to spend a lot of time on the Internet and/or in the library looking up research articles. Both consumer and researcher have to summarize and paraphrase research articles and then integrate them into logical arguments. Both have to document everything and take care in referencing. However, these skills are especially needed at the preliminary stage of information gathering.

Working Only in Laboratories with Artificial Experiments

A second common misconception about research is to think that it only involves people in white coats working in spotless, white-walled laboratories running experimental tests on helpless rats or people. Included with this stereotype are graduate students sitting at computers analyzing statistical data with the hope of graduating one day.

These caricatures discourage many people from either reading research or doing it. Fortunately, it is not a true representation of what research is all about. Research is done in many different environments, such as classrooms, homes, schools, and even on the street. Few people wear white coats anymore except in chemical and animal laboratories. Most researchers whom we know would not look any different from many people we see on the street on any given day. As for computers, many people have them in their homes for their children to do their homework or play games. Computers have become so user-friendly that anyone can use them for all sorts of everyday applications. As for practicality, research results have been applied to help solve some important problems in the classroom and for developing new theoretical models.

Related to this is the misconception that you have to have a PhD (or at least be a PhD candidate) to understand published research. There is no mystery to research. It does not hide behind a veil that only those given the secret keys can unlock. Published research can be understood by anyone who is willing to take the time to understand the basic, and may we say simple, principles that are involved. This book provides these principles.

The Meaning of True Research

Research is the process whereby questions are raised and answers are sought by carefully gathering, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Fundamentals for Discerning Consumers
• PART II The Major Components of Published Research
• Appendix A: Constructing a Literature Review
• Appendix B: Going to the Next Level of Statistics
• Glossary
• Index