Conducting Educational Research

WRITING A RESEARCH QUESTION
may be tainted for those same reasons. Your sample may act or respond in a way
that they feel you want to see rather than more naturally and truthfully. There
may also be ethical considerations. We will explore these more fully later in this
chapter.
3. Consider ease of access. Regardless of whether you choose to study your own
teaching site or another, consider when you will be able to have access to your
sample. For example, if you are going to compare teaching strategies of other
teachers in your own building, are you able to do that? Do they teach during
your planning period or other times you might have available? Are you just
interviewing them? Can you do that before and/or after school? If you will be
administering a survey to the staff, can that be done during a faculty meeting? If
you are going to study a curriculum used by teachers in a neighboring district,
when will you be able to meet with those teachers and see the curriculum being
delivered? Can you do that during a prep period or is there a way that you can
get release time to do that? Is their teaching schedule different from your own?
What kind of paperwork will you need to file in order to gain access to teachers
in another district? Don’t set yourself up for failure by choosing to study an
issue that will cause obvious concerns with data collection.
4. Do not be too abstract with your question. Rather than being interested in
multiculturalism in schools, think about what really concerns you in that area.
Are you interested, for example, in policy, instruction, teacher/student or student/
student relationships? Is it how teachers handle English Language Learners
(ELL) in their classes or how relationships develop between ELL and the native
students in the class? Are you really concerned with what services different
school districts offer for ELL or teaching strategies that might be successful in
working with ELL? Maybe you’re interested in examining how the ELL in your
classroom cope with language difficulties. While you don’t want to be too
narrow at the onset, you also don’t want to be so broad as to have no sense of
where you want to go with the question. Doing background research will help
you in focusing your question, but it really helps to have some basic ideas
before doing much exploring.
5. Be flexible. You have to be willing to adjust and refine your question as you
progress. You may find after doing a literature review that your question should
have a slightly different focus or that you really would rather go a totally different
direction than you had thought. That’s ok! There is a point in quantitative
research where your problem statement will need to become permanently fixed
but you do not need to do that initially.
6. Does your study have any importance? What would be gained by doing this
study? Will it help you or others do your jobs better (practical importance)? Will
it add to our knowledge about education in some important way (theoretical
importance)? Will your study replicate what someone has already done to see if
it works in your context? Conversely, if the question has already been rather
thoroughly studied, perhaps just reading on the topic would provide you with
what you need to know. In that case, it would not make a good problem
statement.
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