Manual for doing an educational research
Introduction
The idea of ​​doing a research in education is to improve or find new ways of teaching, learning and administration in this sphere. There are different approaches for doing it, but it is possible to identify four main types of required knowledge: description, prediction, improvement and explanation. Good and detailed description is very important for further researchers who will be interesting in using your data; studies made on prediction can be oriented for the future outcome or for avoiding mistakes; improvement approach helps to find a new way of usual methods of teaching or work organization. Explanation type requires more effort in comparison to others. Explanation means the ability to give a good theoretical background of the problem, foresee what can happen later and introduce a way of solution.is better always to remember that it is impossible to make such research which will be applicable to all the situations. That is why there will be limitations. Doing a study on education, a researcher will choose participants, for example, teachers performance in Central Finland and then study background and peculiarities, summarizing in a sample. But even within this region there will be cases which are unique, a kind of exception of the sample. Making a study the research will find reasons and connect them to results which can be in this region or in a whole country, but for other countries this research will not be so much useful as there are other reasons and outcomes. That is why a researcher must be very careful in choosing a title and make limits for himself.there are two main kinds of conducting a research: qualitative and quantitative. Both of these approaches combine many methods of data collection. Qualitative research is seen as a detailed study of the situation in general, or in a particular city or school, it will be a case study then, while quantitative research in conducted in the same situations but more as a confirmation to the issue. For example a student wants to study teachers self-evaluation system in Finland. In order to do in qualitative way, he needs to interview talk to people and he will never know to which conclusion he will come in the end; if he decides to choose only one or two teachers and he will need to study their cases more detailed , and it will be a case study then; and for the quantitative research a students will need to use statistical or other numerical data.
Planning a research study
The process of doing a research consists of five parts or stages.
1. Identifying a ...
