Research seminar for Educational Sciences, Lecture 7 by prof. Dr. Chang Zhu

1. Research Seminar for
Educational Sciences
Prof. Dr. Chang Zhu
Department of Educational Sciences

2. Review
A short review
What we’ve learned in the 1st
semester
2

3. Review
What is educational research?
What are the main types of research?
How to identify a research problem?
How to conduct literature review?
What is APA writing style?
How to develop questionnaires and interview
questions?
How to collect data?
What are the components of a research
proposal?

4. Idea
Research
question(s)
Conceptual model
& hypotheses
Data needs
Data collection
Methodologies
Theory should
inform all stages.
Review

5. # Step How
1 The problem area; the research
idea
What’s important? What is relevant?
2 Identify a researchable
problem, specify the research
questions
Researchable, Manageable, Significant
3 Conceptual basis (theory) &
develop hypotheses
Literature, state-of-art, present
knowledge What can the proposed
research add to the present
knowledge? What can be predicted?
4 Identify data needed to ‘test
hypotheses’ or to answer your
research questions
What are dependent and independent
variables?
5 How to collect data? Sampling, data collection methods
6 How to analyze your data? Statistical methods, thematic coding,
etc
Review

6. # Step How
7 What are your findings? Organization of results and
interpretation
8 What can the findings
inform us?
Discussion of results. Can you compare
the results with your expectations, the
theoretical hypothesis, and previous
studies?
9
Conclusions Summary of main findings,
significance
10 Writing the
thesis/research paper
Including step 1-9
Review

7. Reflection
• What you have gained/improved?
• Strong points?
• Weak points?
• Problems?

8. Good research
What makes a good research?
Contains information about the above steps
Has consistency between the steps

9. Good research
• Each research is different but the following
factors are common to all good pieces of
research:
• Sound rational
• Clear aims
• Relevant and clear theoretical basis
• Well-defined research questions

10. A good research idea
• Choose something you are interested in, think it
fascinating, relevant for your future work,…
– You’ll need that personal motivation to pursue the studies.
• Relevant, and in need:
– useful to someone, such as policy makers
– more motivating to work on
– help in a broader research project
– other sources

11. Good research questions
Choose/formulate right type of questions:
• Description
• Relationship
• Descriptive-Comparative
• Causality/impact or affect
• Causality-Comparative
• ………

12. Good research
• Clear structure
• Appropriate and well-defined methodology
• Good research can often use a combination of
methodologies, which complement one another.
• Contributions to the topic/significance (Social
and practical relevance)

13. Good research
• Good education research is a matter not only of sound
procedures but also of beneficial aims and results;
our ultimate aim as researchers and educators is to
serve people’s well-being.
• For their research to be deemed good in a strong
sense, education researchers must be able to articulate
some sound connection between their work and a
robust and justifiable conception of human well-being
(Hostetler, 2005)

14. Typical mistakes/weaknesses:
• Too much on:
– background
– other studies
• Too little on what the current research is about:
– Specific objectives of the current study
– Research questions (not specified or not clear enough)
– Methodologies (not specific, e.g. missing info about
specific methods, instruments, samples, procedures…..)
• Weakness regarding feasibility or scope of research:
– Research questions and hypotheses not specific enough
– Covers too much – “is this feasible?”

15. • Quantitative vs. qualitative research
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddx9PshVWXI

16. Examples
• Examples quantitative research articles
• Examples qualitative research articles

17. Group discussions
Work with example research articles:
Which research methodologies are used?
How the research questions are formulated?
…..

18. Questions
• Questions about your assignment of 1st
semester?