Educational - Practitioner Research

Dr. Randall W. Peterson

Today, as in no other time in history, is it more critical for the educational practitioner (teacher & administrator) to develop educational research competencies to both understand the literature and to perform diagnostic research to validate and enhance instructional practice and student learning.

Practitioners continue to attempt to generalize formal research to their specific setting rather than perform specific research in there classroom or school, which is known as a study of singularity. A study of singularity can be an investigation of something quite small. Though the results cannot be used to predict outcomes in the general population, it may be extremely valuable in the practitioner’s decision making.

Practitioner competencies in the research process, including quantitative, qualitative, mixed method research, basic statistical tools and data analysis will significantly increase the probability that learning will take place. With recent technology enhancements, statistical tools are now available that provide the practitioner a reasonable level of simplicity to formally engage in the research process. Statisticians develop procedures in languages such as Splus, SAS, Minitab, SPSS, etc., which are very specific to statisticians. Many educational practitioner/researchers may not have access to these packages, and therefore may not be able to effectively perform quantitative research. By using Java and the World Wide Web, StatCrunch (http://www.statcrunch.com/) provides the researcher with a web-based technology solution to not only perform statistical analysis, but also store research data, results and formats, to appropriately display and communicate the data.

The Lesson Content of this course was adapted from, John Wasson,
PhD, Professor Emeritus of Special Education at Minnesota State University
Moorhead, Moorhead, Minnesota - 2006