Home

Chapter 1

Applications Exercises

Applications Exercises

This activity contains 6 questions.

	Answer the study questions at the end of Chapter 1.   To create paragraphs in your essay response, type <p> at the beginning of the paragraph, and </p> at the end.

	The following questions are designed to help focus your attention on several important points in Chapter 1. Answer each question in a succinct manner. a. Defend the use of research a valuable source of knowledge on which educators can rely. b. Discuss some examples of how educational research has affected your professional practice. c. Identify a specific theory or theories that you feel has had an effect on your work. d. Quantitative and qualitative research differ along several dimensions. Identify several of these dimensions and discuss the differences between a quantitative and qualitative approach. e. Locate a quantitative research article and a qualitative research article. Explain why you have classified each as quantitative or qualitative. f. Briefly describe how basic, applied, action, and evaluation research might affect your work in terms of specific things you do or approaches you take when working with students. g. Identify a problem or a question that could be the subject of a research project and is important to you professionally. Identify the sequence of steps that you would take to research this problem.   To create paragraphs in your essay response, type <p> at the beginning of the paragraph, and </p> at the end.

	Create your own cognitive map of this chapter.   To create paragraphs in your essay response, type <p> at the beginning of the paragraph, and </p> at the end.

	A teacher is trying to decide whether to teach simple addition facts (e.g., 1 + 2 = 3; 3 + 2 = 5; etc.) by using manipulatives or drill. She has heard good things from other teachers in the school about their use of drill, but she has very little information about the use of manipulatives except that their popularity is somewhat recent. The teacher decides to go by the recommendations of the other teachers and use drill. a. What source(s) of knowledge did the teacher use in making her decision? b. What are the limitations of this source(s)? c. Describe a different approach that the teacher could have used to make her decision.   To create paragraphs in your essay response, type <p> at the beginning of the paragraph, and </p> at the end.

	The following is an abstract from a research article. The study was designed to compare the efficacy of two instructional methods, oral recitation and transcription, on the spelling accuracy of five students with learning disabilities. During oral recitation, the student orally spelled the words presented by the experimenter. Transcription was similar to the recitation method, except that the students were required to write the word as they spelled it. Results showed that all students achieved higher accuracy with the transcription method. a. Is this an example of basic, applied, action, or evaluation research? Defend you answer. b. Is this a quantitative or qualitative study? Explain your answer.   To create paragraphs in your essay response, type <p> at the beginning of the paragraph, and </p> at the end.

	Read the three articles in Chapter 13 (i.e., A Study of Academic Time-on-Task in Elementary School, Reducing Teacher Stress, and Kindergarten Readiness and Retention: A Qualitative Study of Teachers' Beliefs and Practices). Respond to the following questions. a. Why might we consider these articles "scientific inquiry"? b. Why might we be justified calling both articles "research"? c. Discuss the differences between the articles in terms of the goals; the research designs; the ways by which subjects were selected; the type of the data collected and the ways in which that data was collected and analyzed; and the researcher's role. d. Based on these differences, which article would you categorize as quantitative and which is qualitative?   To create paragraphs in your essay response, type <p> at the beginning of the paragraph, and </p> at the end.

Copyright © 1995 - 2009, Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Pearson Allyn & Bacon Legal and Privacy Terms