Description

This substantially revised text provides a comprehensive, highly accessible, and student friendly introduction to the principles, concepts, and methods currently used in educational research.

This text provides a balanced combination of quantitative and qualitative methods and enables students to master skills in reading, understanding, critiquing, and conducting research. Many examples and article excerpts are used throughout the text to demonstrate and highlight best practices in educational research. Evidence-based inquiry is emphasized in two ways: (1) Introductory chapters focus on the added importance of data driven decision-making, (2) Methodological chapters provide explicit guidelines for conducting empirical studies.

Features

• Balanced Coverage. The treatment of qualitative research is parallel to that of quantitative research to enable students to better understand all approaches to research.
• Extensive Use of Examples. Numerous updated excerpts from published studies gradually introduce students to the style and format of published articles. Examples of complete articles illustrate different methodologies.
• Thoughtful Pedagogy. Each chapter includes instructional aids that provide a user-friendly framework, such as key terms, application problems, concept maps, criteria for evaluating studies, and the new MyEducationLab for Research website.
• Extensive Use of Internet. The Internet's application for research is presented throughout.

New to this Edition

The seventh edition of Research in Education: Evidence-Based Inquiry has been extensively revised to respond to increasingly stringent standards for conducting quality research.

The seventh edition includes some important changes. Overall, duplication of some content has been mitigated, and there are new chapters. New and improved features include the following:

• Substantial revision of all chapters with greater depth of coverage to present the most current and useful content available in educational research.
• A new chapter on mixed methods (Chapter 16)
• Expanded coverage of action research (Chapter 19)
• Expanded coverage of measurement—now presented in two chapters, Chapter 8: Quantitative Data Collection: Technical Adequacy and Chapter 9: Collecting Quantitative Data
• The chapter on reviewing literature has combined traditional and internet strategies and resources, emphasizing the use of technology.
• There are now nearly 200 excerpts from 80 different journals.
• The chapter on designing quantitative research has been changed to include design sensitivity and other principles that are important in planning studies. There are some revisions in threats to internal validity, including more emphasis on fidelity of implementation and variability. Sampling and measurement topics have been moved to separate chapters.
• The coverage of secondary data analysis is now included with nonexperimental designs.
• Ethical guidelines and IRB procedures has been expanded.
• There is an increase in the number of diagrams, visuals, and figures to aid understanding.
• The MyEducationLab for Research website is integrated with the text and provides instructors assignable Activities and Applications for each chapter, and gives students interactive practice in evaluating research through Building Research Skills exercises.

Table of Contents

Appendix D:  Glossary

Chapter 1: Introduction to Evidence-Based Inquiry

Chapter 2: Research Designs and Reading Research Reports

Chapter 3: Research Problems, Questions and Hypotheses

Chapter 4: Review of Literature

Chapter 5: Designing Quantitative Research: Purpose, Validity, and Ethical Considerations

Chapter 6: Participants, Subjects and Sampling for Quantitative Designs

Chapter 7: Descriptive Statistics

Chapter 8: Quantitative Data Collection: Technical Adequacy

Chapter 9: Collecting Quantitative Data

Chapter 10: Nonexperimental Research Designs, Surveys, and Secondary Data Analysis

Chapter 11: Experimental, Quasi-Experimental, and Single-Subject Designs

Chapter 12: Understanding and Reporting Inferential Data Analyses

Chapter 13: Designing Qualitative Research

Chapter 14: Collecting Qualitative Data

Chapter 15: Qualitative Data Analysis

Chapter 16: Mixed-Methods Designs

Chapter 17: Concept Analysis and Historical Research

Chapter 18: Evaluation Research and Policy Analysis

Chapter 19: Action Research

 

Appendix A: Answers to Application Problems

Appendix B: Guidelines for Writing Research Proposals

Appendix C: Guidelines for Writing Research Reports

Appendix E: Calculations for Selected Descriptive and Inferential Statistics