Educational Research: An Integrative Introduction

Overview

Are your beginning students sometimes overwhelmed by the prospect of reading research articles or writing a research proposal? Does the notion of educational research make them anxious to begin with? Is research a mystery to them? This text will help. Educational Research: An Integrative Introduction is a brief, basic, paperback alternative to the typically long, weighty, hardcover educational research tome. It takes a practical approach to educational research for beginning students. Students who study its chapters critically learn to read research reports and to produce a proposal for their own research project. Nine complete research reports in Appendix A provide illustrations of major ideas in the text chapters and are used in the end-of-chapter exercises. The reports read include experimental, descriptive, qualitative, and historical approaches. The book presents qualitative and quantitative research as complementary approaches to educational research.

Table of contents

Part I: Introduction to Education Research
Chapter 1: Overview of Research Processes and Products
Chapter 2: Overview of Research Problems and Methods

Part II: Research Problems, Participants, and Instrumentation
Chapter 3: Problem Statements and Literature Reviews
Chapter 4: Participant Procedures
Chapter 5: Instrumentation Procedures

Part III: Methods and Results for Quantitative Studies
Chapter 6: Design Procedures for Experimental Research
Chapter 7: Design Procedures for Descriptive Research
Chapter 8: Descriptive Statistical Data Analyses and Results
Chapter 9: Inferential Statistical Data Analyses and Results

Part IV: Methods for Qualitative Studies
Chapter 10: Qualitative Research Procedures and Results
Chapter 11: Historical Research Procedures and Results

Part V: Integration of Research Problems, Methods, and Outcomes
Chapter 12: Discussion of Results
Chapter 13: Creation of Research Problems and Literature Reviews
Chapter 14: Creation of Proposals for Research Projects

Answers to Selected Exercises

Appendix A: Research Reports
Appendix B: Data Collection Strategies
Appendix C: Inferential Statistical Tests

References
Glossary
Index