The BERA/SAGE Handbook of Educational Research

Dominic Wyse, Neil Selwyn, Emma Smith, Larry E. Suter, Dominic Wyse, Neil Selwyn, Emma Smith, Larry E. Suter

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473987999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Education has continued to grow in stature and significance as an academic discipline. In addition to world renowned research studies the growth of education has been seen in the methodology and methods underpinning its research. The BERA/SAGE Handbook of Educational Research provides a cutting edge account of the research and methodology that is creating new understandings for education research, policy and practice. Over two volumes, the handbook addresses educational research in six essential components: Section 1: Understanding Research Section 2: Planning Research Section 3: Approaches to Research Section 4: Acquiring Data Section 5: Analysing Data Section 6: Reporting, Disseminating and Evaluating Research Featuring contributions from more than 50 of the biggest names in the international field, The BERA/SAGE Handbook of Educational Research represents a very significant contribution to the development of education.

Part I Understanding Research

1 Reasons for Education Research

Ian Menter

The word ‘research’ as here used does not describe any specific method or procedure. It designates a point of view – an attitude of enquiry and of willingness to test any theory against the evidence of the most carefully scrutinised and representative body of available facts. It implies a readiness to give up preconceived notions and to seek guidance not only from traditional interpretations but also from direct observation and experiment in any field of study. When successful, such research adds to the sum of human knowledge, and wise use of its findings leads to the husbanding of resources and the discovery of more satisfactory ways of living. (Fleming, 1952, p. v)

Introduction

The history of educational research is a very long one. In her work, Research and the Basic Curriculum, cited above, Dr C.M. Fleming is reviewing developments of the previous fifty years, that is, the first half of the twentieth century. Some would suggest that we can find the roots of our field, at least in the western world, in the works of Plato and Aristotle. Certainly it is not unusual for contemporary philosophers of education to cite the founders of classical philosophy in their deliberations. Philosophical debates on education also featured strongly during more recent considerations of human development and learning, such as Rousseau's Emile or in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.

So, if philosophy provided the early foundations of our field, there was a major expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the discipline of psychology was developed. For example, the influences of William James in the USA (James was also a philosopher) and Sigmund Freud in Europe can be detected in the discussions around child development and learning on both sides of the Atlantic that took place at that time. Within western thinking, many of the famous names in educational debate at this time – from John Dewey to Montessori, Pestalozzi and Froebel – were reacting to developments in our understanding of human learning and cognition and combining this with a set of clearly defined human values drawn from philosophy.

As the twentieth century progressed an increasingly scientific, even clinical and experimental perspective became significant. The work of the Swiss scientist Jean Piaget and of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky grew increasingly influential on how the processes of education – teaching and learning – were understood.

But also during the twentieth century there was an increasing influence from the discipline of sociology as educationists came to identify the influence of social factors on educational processes and outcomes. As well as the recognition of major connections between education and inequality, much deriving from the economic and political theories of Karl Marx, there was growing recognition of the fundamental social significance of national schooling systems through the work of Talcott Parsons in the USA.

So it was, that when educational studies emerged as a distinctive field around the middle of the twentieth century in the western world, it drew very heavily on philosophy, psychology and sociology, but also because of the way in which the trajectories of education systems were seen to be developing and evolving, history was seen as the fourth disciplinary partner (Tibble, 1966). It was during the twentieth century also that we saw the emergence of education departments in many universities around the world and the creation of a growing number of Professorships of Education, although earlier developments had taken place in Scotland (Hulme, 2013) and in continental Europe.

Of course, disciplines other than the four mentioned above also played a crucial part even if they were less visible. Anthropology, linguistics, economics and later cultural and media studies were also significant contributors, if less central (Furlong and Lawn, 2011). And, in referring to a western tradition it is also important to add two further caveats. First, there is not simply one single western tradition – to this day we can see enormous differences in the way that educational research is understood in different parts of Europe, with particular concepts that have developed within a Germanic tradition, such as ‘bildung’ (the idea of personal and cultural development being closely related), being very difficult for UK-based educationists to fully grasp. Or in the USA the dominance of sociological functionalism has long been apparent, with less support for more critical and historical paradigms (see Grace, 1984).

But second, in focusing on western developments it is necessary to recognise how important other traditions, elsewhere in the globe have been. Among those traditions that have a very different approach to an understanding of education would be those influenced by eastern philosophies and religions such as Confucianism and Buddhism or those that prevailed in pre-industrial civilisations in Africa (see Ukpokudu and Ukpokudu, 2012). In the west the development of state education was often connected to the promotion of a particular religious view – usually a Christian one – as well as to a belief in a form of rationalism inspired by the Enlightenment thinking that emerged so strongly in the eighteenth century. However the comparative study of education systems shows that the underlying premises of those systems may vary very significantly according to the cultural influences that have influenced the historical development of the system. In earlier comparative education studies there was a tendency to adopt a Eurocentric or Anglocentric approach, that is, to see ‘the other’ as strange in some ways. More recent developments in comparative education however are much more ‘context sensitive’ and culturally aware (Crossley and Watson, 2003; Phillips and Schweisfurth, 2007). So, if we can bring such sensitivity to study of education systems, we should also bring it to bear in our approaches to education research more generally.

In this chapter, as well as exploring some of the historical influences on the development of educational research, we consider what are the purposes of undertaking such work. Why is educational research important, what drives people to seek to understand and develop processes of education? Is education a field or a discipline? Is it a mainstream social science? Is it an applied or a pure science or what combination of the two? If educational research is important – and it will of course be argued that it is – then who should be responsible for ensuring its health, its development and its use in education policy and practice?

Why undertake educational research?

In the twenty-first century, throughout the ‘advanced world', the provision of a system of education that is available to all young people with an ensuing phase of higher education for a section of the population is taken for granted as a necessary social good. There may be enormous disputes about how, when and where that provision is made, but the core idea of a system is not in dispute, in the way that it was in the nineteenth century, when at least in some capitalist societies the provision of universal education was seen as a major threat to the stability of society (Thompson, 1963; Simon, 1994).

State provision of education, with compulsory schooling at its core, is assumed to be one of the key responsibilities of governments and is a major element of government spending, through the allocation of part of the revenue raised through general taxation. Education therefore has become a matter for po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Editorial board
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Illustration List
• Illustration List
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Preface
• Editors’ Introduction
• Part I Understanding Research
• 1 Reasons for Education Research
• 2 The Role of Theory in Research
• 3 The Ethics of Research
• 4 Shared Principles of Causal Inference in Qualitative and Quantitative Research
• 5 The Validity and Reliability of Research: A Realist Perspective
• Part II Planning Research
• 6 Approaches to Reviewing Research in Education
• 7 Purposes for Educational Research
• 8 Research Questions in Education Research
• 9 An Introduction to the Importance of Research Design
• 10 A Positivist Orientation: Hypothesis Testing and the ‘Scientific Method'
• 11 Interpretivism as a Theory of Knowledge
• 12 Unpacking Pragmatism for Mixed Methods Research
• 13 Sampling Decisions in Educational Research
• Part III Approaches to Research
• 14 Historical Research
• 15 Using International Comparative Studies in Achievement
• 16 Ethnography
• 17 Grounded Theory
• 18 Case Study Research
• 19 Surveys: Longitudinal, Cross-sectional and Trend Studies
• 20 ‘True’ Experimental Designs
• 21 Educational Action Research as Transformative Practice
• 22 Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
• 23 Mixed Methods Approaches and their Application in Educational Research
• 24 Using Secondary Data Analysis
• 25 Researching in Digital Environments
• Part IV Acquiring Data
• 26 Access, Sites and Settings
• 27 Observing and Recording Classroom Processes
• 28 Personal Experience Methods in Practitioner Research
• 29 Multimodality, Meaning, and Data Analysis
• 30 Research Interviews1
• 31 Surveys and Questionnaires
• 32 Measurement
• Part V Analysing Data
• 33 Cataloguing and Organizing Data
• 34 The Role of Theory in Quantitative Data Analysis
• 35 Descriptive Statistics
• 36 Inferential Statistics
• 37 How Should Numeric Data be Analysed?
• 38 Coding and Analyzing Qualitative Data
• 39 Conversation Analysis
• 40 Discourse Analysis/Critical Discourse Analysis
• 41 Content Analysis
• 42 Confirmatory Factor Analysis
• 43 Logistic Regression
• 44 Multilevel Modelling for Educational Data
• 45 Big Data and Educational Research
• Part VI Reporting, Disseminating & Evaluating Research
• 46 Generalizability
• 47 Writing about Research
• 48 Communicating Research Findings
• 49 Social Media and Academic Publishing
• 50 Evaluation of and Accountability for Individual and Institutional Research on Education
• 51 Using Research Findings
• Index