Getting Started in Your Educational Research: Design, Data Production and Analysis

A one-stop shop for anyone undertaking educational research for the first time, this text focuses on the development and application of key skills necessary for successful research.

Packed with useful exercises, checklists and case studies, this book will allow the reader to apply their skills across a range of essays, presentations and reports. Using digestible language to explain complex terminology and processes simply, the authors explore working with and presenting data and the software options available to students, including NVivo, SPSS and Excel. The text will help students to:

• Understand the language of educational research
• Frame their research questions and design their research
• Judge the quality of educational research
• Explore and justify research approaches and procedures (methods)
• Analyse and present their data

In his 30-year career in higher education Clive has had a variety of extensive teaching and management roles in Sheffield University, Manchester Metropolitan University as Deputy Director of Education, and finally Bradford College as Dean of Education. Throughout his career he has maintained his teaching of research procedures and data analysis. His substantial teaching experience with undergraduates on Initial Teacher Education and Educational Studies courses, as well as practising teachers studying for their Masters, has provided him with extensive understanding of the needs of those starting their foray into educational research. In December 2013, whilst at Bradford College, he became the first person from a non-university environment to achieve the status of Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His semi-retirement has given him more opportunity to continue his attempt to try and improve his fiddle playing.

Dr Desma Brown has extensive experience in the teaching of research methods at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. As Director of the MEd at Bradford College she played a key role in supervising numerous students from the initial stages of development of their research proposals through to successful completion of their dissertations. In her role as a visiting lecturer at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln, she also taught research methods and worked with undergraduate Education Studies students in framing their research. Desma’s current role is as the Head of Education for Kaplan Open Learning (University of Essex online). Desma’s research interest is in sociolinguistics and she completed her EdD in 2016 (Open University), where she used a Discourse Analysis approach to examine how a successful group of final year trainee primary school teachers, used language to collaborate in framing their ideas and working together on an assessment task.