Engaging with Educational Research
Introduction
‘Doing research’ is a process but it is a malleable one that can be
reworked and revised along the way. It must start with a problem which
raises questions, but these can be revised and refined, even discarded
as any process of research or investigation is complex and any one stage
will expose further questions and require further decisions as it
progresses. Each stage of the research depends on decisions made in the
previous stage: the process is cumulative.
In this course you are going to build your understanding of how to
evaluate research by thinking about a fundamental part of the research
process – research perspectives and approaches. Learning about some of
the different ways of researching situations concerned with teaching and
learning and the different theoretical tools used in the research
process, will enable you to begin to interrogate research literature and
address your own research questions. The way research is conceptualised
informs the decision about the approach to the research process. In
this course we examine two distinct and influential ways in which people
have in the past, and continue in the present, to think about and study
the complex phenomenon of learning, and the practices and structures
which support it. These two examples introduce you to the concept of
research paradigms and a framework for thinking about the beliefs and
theories about learners, learning and what it is to know, that lie
behind researchers’ questions and choices about what to pay attention to
and how to do this.
Learning Outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:- understand what a research paradigm is and how paradigms are distinguished from each other by the beliefs and theoretical perspectives drawn on
- understand how a choice of research paradigm and associated methodology relates to how a research problem is conceptualised
- understand how different paradigmatic and methodological positions have led over time to different views about what counts as evidence and, as a consequence, what is judged to be valuable educational research.
How research is reported and how the process is enacted demonstrates
many of the tools specific to doing research in an educational
community. In this course we adopt a broad understanding of tools that
goes beyond the physical that we apply to natural objects and includes
the psychological and semiotic that we apply to ideas and concepts.
Tools, in this broad view, enable us to engage in certain activities in
certain ways – they are the mediational means with which people act. The
choice and use of tools shape the activity. The activity we are
interested in is educational enquiry and the specific tools we focus on
here are the theories that researchers draw on.
This issue about the nature and role of ‘theory’ has been at the
heart of much debate over educational practice and the contribution that
research can make to it. A research question emerges from, and/or is
positioned within, the way in which the researcher sees the world – that
is, the set of beliefs and concepts that inform the research. The
intention in this course is for you to start to explore what such
stances or perspectives mean for how research is conducted. But first
let us consider what we understand a theory to be.
