Launching a Research Project: Why and How to Get Started

[...]a reading specialist who wants to know whether his teaching practices are encouraging his students to think more critically will need to: 1. identify one or more specific teaching practices he wishes to investigate (teaching students to ask a particular set of questions about reading passages or asking students to respond to reading selections in a journal, for example); 2. decide which behaviors of his students constitute "thinking critically" (asking particular kinds of questions about a reading selection or scoring a particular number of points on a test of critical thinking, for example); 3. decide how he will describe and/or measure his behaviors and his students' behaviors (a student asking a particular kind of question may count as one "critical thinking" episode, for example). Both correlational research and experimental research, quantitative methods, are used to investigate the relationship between two variablea The former is used when it is impossible or undesirable to manipulate the variablea The latter is more generally known as hypothesis testing or analysis of variance or significance testing, and involves manipulation of conditions. Descriptive research, the first of our two qualitative designs, involves the use of such tools as surveys and questionnaires, interviewa observations, and objective tests to describe behaviors and characteristica An individual doing a descriptive study of math students' problem-solving methods might use, for example, student-written logs describing steps used in solving a particular problem, or a student's scrap papers recording his solution. If regrouping is not possible or practical after initial testing, then an anxiety scale with alternate forms might be used for pre- and post-testing, with the average difference between the two scores used in comparing the two groupa Also, more complex experimental research designs can be used to measure the effects of combinations of independent variables, so that, for example, the effects of both different instructors and different teaching methods on writing anxiety can be examined.