Strategy Is Particularly Important When

¶ … strategy is particularly important when it comes to research in education or any other field. For this particular study, a research strategy will be developed that will be used for critiquing and improving some aspect of a training/teaching approach, clarifying what data to collect, and how to analyze it. The researcher will be conducting educational research within the school district on using a new instructional intervention to raise test scores, and therefore a research strategy must be created that will assist with this. Three issues will be discussed here, and these are: 1) the purpose of drafting a research plan before actually conducting the research, 2) each component in a research plan and its rationale, and 3) at least two ethical considerations involved in conducting and reporting educational research. All of these issues must be properly addressed for the researcher to establish what will be done in a specific study.

The purpose of drafting a research plan is highly significant, and there are specific steps that have to be taken. These will be discussed later, but for now it is important to understand why the creation of the research plan is significant. A research plan helps to show the researcher (and others) where the research is going and where it began. A starting point for the research must be located so that the researcher can lay out the rest of the research plan. In this case, the starting point for the research would be the identification of the problem with the training/teaching method that will be researched and addressed. Once that has been established, the researcher can then work to determine what kind of research will be undertaken, what methods will be used, and what outcome is generally expected to be found when the research has been completed.

There are several components in a research plan, and they should now be addressed here. The first component is the research question, as the researcher has to know what is being studied in order to study it. The second component is the rationale for the research. In addition to the question that will be studied, there must be a reason for the study. In other words, if there is no point in studying a particular question, there is no reason for the study. The rationale can not only give the researcher a strong idea of where he is going, but it can also give others a good idea of the plan that is seen for the research so that there will be a clear understanding of what the researcher plans to do.

After these issues, the next component is to examine what kind of methodology will be used for the study. The methodology of any study is specifically important because there are different types of methodologies that can be used and these different types all yield very different results as well. The researcher must decide whether to use a quantitative or a qualitative methodology and must also decide what specific way he or she wants to conduct the methodology from that point. Case studies, statistics, and other options are all good choices for methodologies, but they do not all work well for each specific type of study and therefore the type of methodology becomes highly significant.

Once all of these specific issues have been addressed, the researcher can assume that he or she has a good plan that can generally be used as the start of a research project. Sometimes, a research plan will have to be modified somewhat, but this is not always the case and some research plans are perfectly acceptable from the beginning. For those that are not, however, the research plan gives a good 'jumping-off' point from which changes can be made in order to get the best research study possible.

Ethical considerations are very important where research is concerned, and two specific ethical considerations will be discussed here. The first ethical consideration is that there will very likely be human subjects used in this type of research study because the study is interested in the teaching/training information that will be examined. By looking at the teaching and/or training information that will be studied and the reactions of the students, much more can be learned in a qualitative methodology. This is of utmost importance to the researcher that has created a careful research plan and that has thought about what type of methodology he or she is going to use for the actual research study.

The second ethical consideration that the research must address is the changes that could be brought about from the research. There are many ways to study something of this nature, but the easiest way is to study the materials, the students, and the teacher. The students have been addressed in the first ethical consideration, but the materials and the teacher of the materials will also be affected by the study and the results that are found. This is important to note, because there are concerns regarding the changes that might be made when it comes to the teacher of the materials and adjustments that are made to the materials themselves.