Educational Research

 

Education Research

Education research is the scientific field of study that examines education and learning processes and 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

From the previous section, you can see that there are many types of activity that fall under the umbrella of educational ‘research’. These include projects that investigate educational changes or developments that are being planned to define the best way of proceeding. Development projects typically include a small pilot study of an educational intervention, carried out with a view to informing how best to implement larger-scale reform

Other projects focus on review or evaluation of existing educational activities or curriculum change. These may be small-scale, local projects (such as introducing different teaching or learning methods or new clinical activities) or evaluation of large-scale national initiatives (such as the training programmes or national examinations).

Systemic literature reviews are another educational research activity. These may be carried out as part of ongoing research to inform the research process or as a discrete activity to provide information to a specific audience about the current findings from published literature.

‘Education research is often carried out in naturalistic settings that may carry threats to the validity of the study such as loss of subjects, selection bias, historical events or maturation’ (Bordage and Dawson, 2003). Educational research therefore differs from other types of research with which you may be more familiar, such as clinical or laboratory research. Educational research draws on different research and theoretical paradigms from scientific research, which has traditionally been grounded in a positivist stance. Educational research draws largely from the social sciences in its approach, research methods and interpretation of results, and may involve a shift in perspective from the seeking of irrefutable ‘facts’ and universal ‘truths’, to offering new insights, acknowledging the subjectivity of researchers, the impact of the research process itself on subjects and outcomes, and the agency of the subjects of the research. Nonetheless, this does not make educational research and its methods less rigorous or valid than those of the physical sciences, but they may require researchers to take a different approach, draw from a different body of knowledge and take particular care over study design and consideration of confounding variables