Educational Research: It's funny how different research can be from one subject area to the other. After I finished my undergrad in chemistry, I started a masters program in education because I wanted to make a difference in the world through teaching. During my undergraduate career, I like to believe I became adept with the research process fairly quickly, achieving two publications in the span of a year and a half. As I progressed through my master's program we were told that a research project would be our grand finale, the summation of all the work we have completed as a teacher to show the world or to inform our practice. It would occur to me that all of my hard science research would amount to little more than a faint resource when it came to educational research. As I've progressed down this road I've noticed two main similarities. First off, your questions that you start with change dramatically throughout the course of the research. Second, whatever you thought you knew you will come to realize you know nothing about. The main difference between these two types of research is one is about solving a problem or answering a specific question through hard quantitative facts. The other is about providing information through soft quantitative and qualitative information. I believe that has been the hardest part for me. There was also a very huge and glaring ambiguity that came with educational research vs. the scientific research I have done in the past. In science you are asking questions about something that has a foundation that doesn't change. You were asking questions about something that you already have a base knowledge for, and some of those ideas, laws, and topics within that base knowledge are hard facts and remain true. Educational research was different. Instead we were asked to create questions about our own teaching practices to inform our practice before we had actually had a chance to go out and teach. Also for those of you that aren't familiar with education, there is nothing about education that remains constant or is a hard fact (aside from the content you teach.) The location and type of school that you decide to teach at will yield very different experiences. Even your different classes within the same school will produce different and unique experiences. Even the dynamics of your day to day experiences will change within the same class. So the question I've been pondering being in this program is, how does one actually get any accurate information to make an informed decision on whether or not a practice is great. The true answer is, they don't. So what is the purpose of educational research? I've found that it's importance lies within the process of having us as teachers reflect and analyze our own practice to continually improve it as we grow as professionals. My research question I proposed the first semester of my master's program looks nothing like the research question I have now. Most of the work I did first semester on starting to "build" our research essentially amounts to nothing at this point aside from the few papers I found that relate to project based learning. Even the research question I proposed at the end of second semester changed. Why was this change occurring? It was happening because I had not been running my own classroom yet! During the summer we also had a week long class to refine and start to build our research. At this time we still had not been an actual teacher running the show, we had only student taught. So I bet you can assume what has happened to the research question I proposed during the summer vs. what I am proposing now? Yes, you are right, it has changed. For those who are familiar with research, when your question changes usually everything else about your research changes. First off your methods of how you are actually going to gather data will change. This is due to the fact that your methods are designed to give you information to inform the question you are asking. Next, your resources change. You know the hundreds of hours you spent reading through the articles that matched your research question perfectly? Yea well only about a fraction of those papers will probably be able to be used as resources for your new question (depending on how similar the question is). So yes, as your research question changes, all parts that you have designed for your research change along with it. My main question for all of this is what was the point? Why did we go through "thinking" and "preparing" for a research question that we didn't actually know if we wanted to ask or not because we weren't actually professionals in the field! The only idea I can think of is to teach us the research process, which for someone with as much research background as me was just tedious and redundant. You could argue that this is what they do in science. The main difference though is that even when your question changes is science its really answering a smaller question which is leading you to your original big question because we know what to expect from science (at least in chemistry and physics). There is no ambiguity of how your experience will be based on where you are or who you are working with because you are working in a field that has some foundational constants. I know this blog has turned into a semi rant, but I want my frustrations to be heard because I feel like I poured hours upon hours of meaningless work into the program I am in because we were told at the beginning to start doing things for a research project before we really had any idea about what kind of questions that we wanted to ask. It is too late now though, it has been done and all that remains is for me to push forward and ask myself how will I take what I have and try to salvage the hours I've put in to answer my new question.
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December 2019
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