Thanks for great questions and engagement with Pia who is at your service when you need help with using library services or developing queries for your literature review. This support is available to you throughout your program.

Below find a couple notes drawn from the readings from last week.

What is the Purpose of Educational Research?

  • Advance knowledge: Like any scientific field, educational research aims to build a deeper understanding of how people learn and develop. It contributes to theories about cognition, motivation, and social interaction in educational settings.
  • Improve practice: The most direct goal is to find out what works best in educational settings. This includes evaluating teaching methods, curriculum materials, and assessment techniques to help educators make informed decisions.
  • Inform policy: Research provides the evidence needed for administrators and policymakers to create effective school policies, allocate resources wisely, and develop large-scale educational reforms.
  • Address problems: Researchers often tackle pressing issues in education, such as achievement gaps, student well-being, equity, and the integration of technology (Creswell, 2012).

Ways to Contribute to Research

  • Identify a Gap: A thorough review of the literature may reveal a question that has not been asked or an area that has been overlooked. Your research then aims to fill this gap.
  • Challenge a Prevailing Theory: You may conduct research that produces data contradicting a widely accepted theory, forcing the field to reconsider its assumptions.
  • Provide Additional or New Evidence: Your work might offer new, more robust evidence that supports, refines, or extends an existing theory into a new context.
  • Develop a New Methodology: Your contribution might be the creation of a new technique or tool that allows other researchers to ask and answer questions in a novel way.
When thinking about your research direction, question what is and why? What impacts have come from the decisions of the past and how do we move forward in the best possible way. Why are you interested in this topic? Why is it important? Why should other people be interested, too? 

Preparing for next week

Once you have your research portfolio setup, please complete this survey. This will give me the link to your website and let me know how you want to engage and share.

Just one reading for this coming week and to help you prepare for the SSHRC two pager.

Creswell, J. W. (2012). The Steps in the Process of Research. In Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (Fourth Edition). Pearson Education, Inc.

As mentioned in class, it can be useful to incorporate language and strategic directions at the national or global level when describing your research for the SSHRC application. Consider aligning with Canada’s Federal sustainable development strategy goals and departmental contributions or the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals, or more specifically for SSHRC, Imagining Canada’s Future: 16 global challenges from SSHRC with many more details available in this report.