Teacher-Led Research

Designing and implementing randomised controlled trials and other forms of experimental research

Richard Churches, Eleanor Dommett

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785830402
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Please note: due to the tabular nature of some of the content, this ebook is best viewed on a larger screen. Teacher-led research can transform practice and enhance attainment and school improvement. Teacher-Led Research by Richard Churches and Eleanor Dommett equips teachers with the essential knowledge to design their own classroom research projects. With knowledge of scientific method, teachers can conduct their own research into areas of particular interest in their classrooms, taking control of education research and using it to inform their practice. Teachers can, for example, assess the impact of different pedagogies and prove which strategies work, which can ultimately enhance learning and attainment for pupils and drive whole-school improvement. New and innovative approaches led by teaching schools (outstanding schools following the model of teaching hospitals) are beginning to apply the same approaches used in clinical practice to their school improvement focused research work. In Teacher-Led Research you will learn how to apply similar approaches within your own classroom and in collaboration with others across different schools. Teacher-Led Research is a how-to guide for teachers, whether they use the term evidence-based, evidence-informed, evidence-engaged or evidence-led to describe the way they think about the challenge of making a difference to the learners they teach. Richard and Eleanor take teachers through the process of designing, implementing and writing up a study, encouraging them to focus on how they could apply this to their own context and interests. Teacher-Led Research provides an introduction to scientific method and guides teachers from research question to hypothesis, covers designing experimental research and implementing a study, and introduces the statistical concepts needed to analyse and write up research, enhancing teachers' research literacy. Finally, it provides a guide to interpreting findings and writing up research. This is an essential guide for anyone wanting to conduct their own randomised controlled trials, carry out their own classroom-based studies, collaborate with other schools on projects or just better understand teacher-led research and what it could mean for their practice. This book will be of interest to anyone who is involved in school-level practitioner research, or who wishes to develop their skills in this area. It will also be of interest to teachers who are beginning university education qualifications.

Chapter 1

An introduction to scientific method

By the end of this chapter, you will know about:

• The stages of scientific method.
• The difference between experimental and observational research.
• Research ethics.

Scientific method

Scientific method is the name given to a process of designing and conducting research that involves making observations and interpreting them in the context of very specific questions. It is not a new method. Indeed, there is even a reference to such an experiment in the Bible to examine the impact of eating meat and wine compared to a vegetarian diet with no alcohol:

But Daniel appealed to a steward who had been assigned by the head of the palace staff to be in charge of Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. ‘Try us out for ten days on a simple diet of vegetables and water. Then compare us with the young men who eat from the royal menu. Make your decision on the basis of what you see.’ The steward agreed to do it and fed them vegetables and water for ten days. At the end of the ten days they looked better and more robust than all the others who had been eating from the royal menu.

Daniel 1: 11–14

While this biblical reference illustrates that the process is not new, it does not tell us much about how it works beyond the central importance of comparing different conditions. In this case the two ‘conditions’ are two types of diet. This detail is best illustrated with a flow chart showing the process step by step (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1. Scientific method begins with a specific question.

As you can see, the process of scientific method begins with a specific question. There is nothing special about this question – it will often have arisen through curiosity or some attempt to explain a previous observation.

Let’s take a very simple example and ask the question, ‘Why are carrots orange?’ Once we have asked the question, we might attempt to find some information to help us answer it. This information could be reports from previous research or it could be the opinions of experts on colour pigments. In a classroom context, teachers views based on professional experience might be the starting point.

After we have collected some background information about how this could be measured, we need to construct a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a formal statement of what we think the answer to the question might be. In this case the hypothesis may be:

Carrots are orange because they contain the pigment carotene.

This is a statement that we can test (assuming we had access to carrots and a lab!). Importantly, the hypothesis needs to be a statement that the outcome of the experimental research could support (i.e. agree with) or not support (i.e. disagree with). Once we have completed the test and interpreted the results, in the context of the original hypothesis, the results are then reported somewhere for others to read. We can then continue the process by revising our hypothesis if the results did not support our original hypothesis or attempting to replicate our findings if they did support it.

Replication means repeating a study in order to see if the same result occurs again. As you will learn later, we are only ever dealing with probabilities in this type of research. Specifically, our findings are all related to the probability that the result may have happened by chance, so there is always the possibility that we may be wrong. Replication helps to solve this problem because if the result is true, we are likely to find it repeated more times than not.

Remember: we are only ever dealing with probabilities in this type of research. Replication helps to solve this problem.

Of course, in this simplified example the process looks quite straightforward, so you may find it hard to see how scientific method, when described in this way, can be applied to complex contexts such as education, which will clearly require more complex experimental research than that required for testing for the presence of a particular pigment in a carrot. In order to see how this can be done, it is necessary to explain a little more about the concept of experimental research. Before we do this, you may want to complete the activity in Learning Zone 1.1 so that you have some ideas to play with later on.

Learning Zone 1.1. What would you like to find out?

Think about a topic you are interested in exploring and try to come up with some questions on which you could base some research. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

• Which is better for learning times tables – rote learning or flash cards?
• What is the effect of group work on reducing misconceptions in column addition?
• Do girls or boys perform better when given structured homework compared to a freer approach?
• Does an intervention you are thinking of using (which is shown to be effective in another context) work in your own school?

Approaches to research

Now that you have some questions of interest, let’s look more carefully at what is meant by experimental research. The term ‘experimental’ is banded around quite freely so most people have a general idea of what it means. If we think of something as experimental we are recognising that the outcome, whether it is taking a drug or trying a new hair style, is somewhat unknown. This is also true of the term when it is used in the context of research; however, here it takes on a rather more specific meaning.

Experimental research refers to a type of investigation that uses the manipulation of variables (or things of interest) and controlled testing to understand causal events. Although this sounds complex, it is easy to understand if we compare experimental research to another type of research – observational research. In observational research, the researcher observes participants and measures variables without controlling for other factors or directly allocating people to certain conditions. For example, if a researcher is interested in the effect of multivitamins on self-esteem in women, this could be studied using experimental research or observational research. Table 1.1 illustrates the different approaches.

Experimental	Observational
Find 100 women who do not currently take any vitamins and have ‘average’ or ‘normal’ levels of self-esteem.	Find 100 women, 50 of whom have been taking multivitamins for three months.
Randomly allocate 50 women to a group in which they must take multivitamins and 50 to a group where they must not take multivitamins.
Measure self-esteem after the women have been in the conditions for three months.	Measure self-esteem in these women.
Analyse and interpret the data.	Analyse and interpret the data.

Table 1.1. The difference between experimental and observational research.

For the experimental research approach, you can see that the researcher directly manipulates the variable of vitamin intake by placing some participants in one condition (where they receive vitamins) and others in a different condition (where they do not receive vitamins). By doing this, the researcher is able to examine causality between two things (multivitamins and self-esteem) rather than simply associations between the two things. There is, however, no such manipulation for the observational version of the study.

In education, until recently, we have tended to take an observational approach without comparing our intervention to something else at the same time (such as a control condition) – a practice that generally means we have never been entirely sure whether the change might have happened anyway.

Types of experimental research

Experimental research typically involves some form of randomisation to different groups before exposing them to a treatment or a control (see Figure 1.2). It is also possible to collect both quantitative and qualitative research data during this process.

In ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Dr Ian Devonshire
• Preface
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1: An introduction to scientific method
• 2: From research question to hypothesis
• 3: Designing experimental research
• 4: Implementing your study
• 5: Statistics – here comes the maths
• 6: A basic introduction to the most frequently used inferential statistics
• 7: Interpreting your findings and writing up your research
• Concluding remarks
• Test yourself answers
• Glossary
• Copyright