Reflection on Assignment 2 - EER500

I have just submitted my second and final assignment for EER500 - Introduction to Educational Research. It is a little before the due date but as I have an assignment for ETL503 due on the same day, I need to get cracking with it.

The second assignment for EER500 involved taking our research question from the first assignment and selecting a research design and research methods as a sort of mini-research-proposal. I am still blown away by the amount of information I needed to read and understand. Research planning is a very complex task and I can understand now why it may take years, even decades for a research plan to be completed.

In choosing the research design and methods we were asked to look at the strengths and limitations of various designs and justify why we chose what we did. In the first assignment I got the idea that a good research question sets the context for the research so firstly I looked back at my research problem and question. I don't feel that I had much choice in selecting a research design - it was my question that chose the design. In summary I looked at the features of quantitative and qualitative research strategies and what my question was telling me. After selecting quantitative I looked at the different types of quantitative research design and again, looked at what my question was telling me. Was it asking for descriptive or experimental research?

Next I looked at the different types of experimental research - a choice between the laboratory experiment or the quasi-experiment, choosing quasi-experiment for reasons set out in my assignment. Further on, I had to consider what data-collection strategies I would involve and why? I went with a pre-intervention questionnaire, intervention through professional development and then a post-intervention questionnaire. By no means was that all there was to it.

We had to look at ethical issues as well and note what ethical considerations we might need for our research. We also had to work out what research paradigm our particular methods and design followed. It was heavy stuff!

What have I learned?

Where do I start? I think the work about research paradigms has had the most impact on me. At first I was thinking why on earth do we need to consider this stuff? But through my readings I discovered how relevant it is to research, indeed, how relevant it is to how you approach so many things. More details on this in my next post: What's my paradigm?

Also I have become very aware that research is not conducted in a vacuum. The results of educational research influence how people think and consider education topics and issues. It can produce change in procedures and methods. For these reasons it is imperative that researchers do their utmost to produce quality, ethical research, that is free from the bias of their own and others assumptions about social reality.