Understanding Education Research

A Guide to Critical Reading

Gary Shank, Janice Pringle, Launcelot Brown

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351344906
• Auflage: 2
• Thema: Education
• Thema: Education General

Understanding Education Research, 2nd Edition is designed to help students learn to read educational research articles carefully, systematically, and critically. Readers will learn how to categorize titles, decode abstracts, find research questions, characterize research arguments, break down methods and procedures, explore references, apply analysis strategies, and interpret findings. This textbook and quick reference guide allows students to easily develop the skills they need to become research literate and the 2nd edition has been updated throughout to offer simple guidelines for qualitative, quantitative, and statistical approaches and up-to-date information on complex and confusing methodologies.

1
The Role of Research

This is yet another book about the role of research in the field of education. I don’t blame you for wondering why we need yet another book about research. Our answer is simple—we want to talk about research not as just a tool for looking at how to understand and improve education but as a process that is fundamental to education itself.

Before we talk about how fundamental research is to education, we first must talk about how fundamental education itself is. We have argued for some time that education is a basic human process (Shank, 2005). That is, education is as fundamental as any other basic human experience. We eat, we sleep, we seek companionship, we create and raise our young, we seek shelter, and we teach and learn from each other.

Try this little experiment. Look at any group of people gathered informally. Once they start talking to each other, within minutes, they are teaching and learning. We see this in just about every human setting. It is part of our nature as human beings. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to us that education pervades every aspect of human culture.

Human beings specialize and institutionalize many of their basic processes. For instance, we don’t just seek food in the wild. We go to the local grocery, specialty supermarket, or Chinese restaurant, for example. Education is no different. We have created many formal systems of education. Our system of public education is the largest example and the one that professionally engages most of us.

When we look at schooling as a formal system, we see that it has many components. Professional researchers do their work because they want to improve the way things work, or sometimes just because they are curious and want answers to basic questions—that is, research on its own terms can be just as basic as any other aspect of education. We all are curious, and we all want to make things better. But research goes further in its service to teachers and students.

Teachers, for their part, need to be able to deliver accurate and up-to-date information to their students. They need to be able to organize that material so that it is quickly and easily learned. They need to able to check and see what their students are learning and not learning. They need to be able to manage their students as individuals and as groups in order to sustain a proper climate for learning. The list goes on and on.

When we look at the areas discussed here, they all have at least one thing in common—they all depend on ongoing research efforts in order to realize their potential for students and teachers. That is, without research, there is no formal process of schooling as we know it. If research stopped, teachers would soon be teaching out-of-date material. They would be dependent on learning and behavioral strategies that might not be able to address the needs of our ever-changing society. There would be at least stagnation and at worst a disconnection between our culture and our educational process. For these, and for many other reasons that we have not mentioned, research is a fundamental part of the educational system.

As we move forward, we need to look at our relationship to research and how this affects our roles as educational professionals. We begin this process in the next chapter.

2
Research Literacy and the Research Critic

As we have already argued, research is a fundamental part of the educational profession. No matter what role you play in this field, from being a teacher or administrator or a researcher yourself, you need to be able to address the flood of ongoing research that is constantly being produced. Another way to put this is to say that you need to be research literate.

What Is Research Literacy?

Once upon a time, there was only literacy, or what we might call basic literacy. Basic literacy involved the ability to read and write (cf. Adler & Van Doren, 1972; Bloom, 2001). People who cannot read or write are called illiterate. As you can imagine, it is quite a stigma in our culture to be illiterate. However, there have been times and cultures where no one or only a handful of people were literate. Those cultures were called oral cultures. People in oral cultures were not stupid or backward; they just lived in a culture where reading and writing were not the norm and therefore were not necessary for being able to function successfully in that culture (Ong, 2002).

Nowadays, there are almost no purely oral cultures left—at least within the context of basic literacy. Reading and writing are required skills at most levels of life for most of us. However, there are also other forms of literacy. Some of the more specialized forms of literacy involve things like math literacy, science literacy, art literacy, sports literacy, film literacy, cultural literacy, and so on. All of these specialized “literacies” employ their own set of crucial concepts and quite often their own specialized languages. As a result, most of us are not all that “literate” in art or sports or film or cultural studies. We can appreciate these areas but usually at a more basic consumer level. We leave it to the experts, or the critics, in those areas to guide us and help us judge what is valuable and what is trivial for us.

At one time in the field of professional education, it was considered adequate to be able to follow the advice of researchers, and we did not have to worry about whether we could understand the nuts and bolts of their research ourselves. To put it another way, it was not necessary for us to be research literate. But that time has passed. We are now in an era where everyone in the field of education, from teachers to administrators to professors to researchers, needs to develop a complete and comprehensive picture of how research functions. We call this research literacy. In order to be research literate, the person needs to know the following:

• The basic principles of qualitative and quantitative research in education
• How research articles are put together
• How to read research articles at increasingly more complex levels
• How to evaluate the quality of the research

When people are able to read and evaluate research articles at these very high levels, they are more than just research literate. They can rightfully be called research critics. One of the main goals of this book is to help put you on the road not just toward research literacy but toward becoming a research critic yourself. To do this, we need to start with a clear understanding of what a research critic really is.

What Is a Research Critic?

If we think of the field of education as a community where people do different things, there are four basic roles that each and every one of us in the larger community might play. The best way to think of these roles is to imagine them as falling along a spectrum.

At the near end of the spectrum are those people in this culture who play no direct role in the educational community. They are no longer in school, nor do they have children who are being educated. We can call these people Invested Bystanders. Invested Bystanders, however, are not neutral about education. Even though they (or their families) are not being educated per se, they are being affected by how well or how poorly education as a process is being performed. Furthermore, and this is a major point, most of them are also helping to pay (via their taxes) for the education for all our children as a whole.

The better the education system in their communities, for instance, the lower the crime rate and the more likely some of these Invested Bystanders will be able to find skilled workers and service providers. Invested Bystanders tend to care very much about the quality of education. That concern, however, is almost always in terms of results—that is, how well is the educational system meeting their larger social and cultural needs? While Invested Bystanders might refine their understanding of educational research and its findings to some degree, most often, they are content to leave the details to others (so long as the educational system is producing its desired results).

At the complete other end of the spectrum are those people who are most active in the formulation, creation, and dissemination of actual educational research projects and findings. These people are the Researchers. Researchers need to have the most direct, comprehensive, and up-to-date knowledge and understanding of educational research as a whole—that is, they need to know what types of research have been conducted, past and present, how to do research, and how to communicate research findings to others. To become a Researcher most often requires years of specialized training and extensive actual research experience.

The next step on the spectrum away from Invested Bystanders and toward Researchers are those people who are making use of the educational system in order to learn. This group has more of a stake in the process than Invested Bystanders but their level of experience falls far short of the need to be actual Researchers. This group, which most often consists of students and their parents (unless the students are adult students), we can call the Consumers of education. This group is more concerned with the proper performance of educational systems than it is with how educational systems are designed, altered, and studied. The only time that educational research per se matters to them, usually, is in those situations where research (often new and controversial) plays a direct role in day-to-day education. Also, as Consumers, they have the right to expect that the educational system will deliver on its promises and commitments, and these consumers have the right to hold educational systems accountable. Therefore, Consumers are usually interested in the research process to the degree that research improves either the operation or accountability of education.

Before we leave the topic of Consumers of education, it is only fair to point out that some educational researchers have defined teachers and administrators as Consumers of educational research, as well (e.g., Hittleman & Simon, 2005; McMillan, 2011). We reject this notion explicitly and emphatically. It is our feeling that the notion of “consumer” implies a passive state of consumption, and there is nothing passive about the need for educational professionals to improve their understanding or their engagement in the educational process. They actively seek not just to be informed but also to be able to understand and engage in the results of the research they are reading. In other words, most professionals in education find themselves in between the consumers of research and the researchers themselves.

Those people whose skills and knowledge surpass those of the Consumer but who are not actual researchers themselves, we can call Research Critics. Research Critics actively seek out research and then engage critically in its findings.

Research as a Conversation

One last characteristic of critics is that they are conducting a conversation with the research they read. They are not just being critics for the sake of being critics—they are trying to fashion points that are useful and important.

At the same time, there is another increasingly important conversation going on. That is the conversation between the research critic, the research article, and the research community at large. No piece of research is done in a vacuum. Each research article is part of a greater context of issues being explored and discussed by the larger research community. As critics, we need to be alert not only to what an article is telling us, but also what it is telling the larger research community in terms of one of that community’s ongoing conversations. To whatever degree that is necessary, we are passing along this type of contextual information from those research communities to our constituents. We all need to know what a given article says, why it says it, and how this relates to the larger research community.

***

The purpose of this book is to help you start down the road toward becoming an authentic research critic in the field of education. Here is our plan of action:

• In Chapter 3, we look at the basic levels of understanding that all research critics need to develop. These understandings deal with the nature of educational research per se, as well as an understanding of the quantitative approach to research, the use of statistics as both a perspective and a tool, the qualitative approach to research, and finally how mixed methods approaches might be developed and used.
• In Chapter 4, we make a case for why articles are the basis of research literacy and then compare and contrast quantitative and qualitative articles.
• In Chapters 5 through 12, we carefully and systematically examine each and every one of the key aspects of research article structure, from the title through discussions and conclusions. In this manner, we build our ongoing critical awareness of the purpose and role of each of these formal parts and how they differ across qualitative and quantitative articles.
• In Chapter 13, we examine concepts where we will need to grow more experienced and directions we can follow to build upon our growing expertise.
• In Chapter 14, we conclude by looking at both the future and the bigger picture.

While some of this material might be challenging to you, we suspect that other parts will be quite familiar and straightforward. We have chosen to err on the side of caution, to try to ensure that we are as clear as possible and that all of us are able to move forward together. We know that you are very intelligent and that you know a great deal about education and even educational research, but all of us are prone at times to gaps in our knowledge and understanding.

We invite you to move forward in the exciting process of developing your skills toward becoming a research critic.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1 The Role of Research
• 2 Research Literacy and the Research Critic
• 3 Basic Approaches in Educational Research
• 4 Types of Research Articles
• 5 Understanding Titles and Abstracts
• 6 Understanding Rationales and Purposes
• 7 Understanding Questions and Arguments
• 8 Understanding References
• 9 Understanding Methods and Procedures
• 10 Understanding Quantitative Results and Findings
• 11 Understanding Qualitative Results and Findings
• 12 Understanding Discussions and Conclusions
• 13 Advanced Concepts and Techniques
• 14 The Research Path
• Bibliography
• Appendix A: Guidelines for Article Evaluations
• Appendix B: Dissecting an Article
• Index