EDFD 6003 Educational Research: June 7

When designing a research proposal (which you will be doing in this class), you must first decide what you are really interested in researching. You may be interested in determining that if by using one method of motivation with one group of students and another method with another group of students the students unit test scores will be different (or if their behavior problems decrease). You might want to know what study strategies students typically use for your tests. You may want to know what the opinions are of faculty members concerning the new remediation program. You might want to know if your male students score as well as your female students on their writing after using a new writing approach. You might want to know what the relationship is between hours of practice and student concert performance. You may want to know the impact of peer tutoring on second language learners. Or, you might want to know if teaching a group of students how to throw a pitch using one technique results in more strikes than another technique.

To examine such interests, you must first write a research question (like we practiced yesterday). It must be worded in such a way that it can clearly be identified as one of the six design types we studied (historical, qualitative, descriptive, correlational, causal-comparative, or experimental). What type of question your create will determine what sort of participants you will need to use in your study, what type of measuring instruments or research tools you will use, what type of analysis will be required, what sort of review of research you will be emphasizing, and how you will set up your proposed study.

The research questions (that you practiced writing yesterday) are the first step towards designing a useful study. Please take some time today to consider two or three research questions for which you may be interested in planning your study. Here are five sites that may help you as you think about your possible research questions. Some of these sites have general ideas for guiding you to a research question, others have general questions that could be designed into an official research question, and some are research thought-starter sites.