A variety of resources are available online for your study of Educational Research in an Age of Accountability
- http://www.ucc.ie/hfrg/projects/respect/urmethods/natural.htm
Instructors for this class may wish to have students conduct a naturalistic observation in their own classroom. In order to know exactly how to do this, students could refer to this website. The chapter talks briefly about the topic, but this site explains naturalistic observation in greater detail. The website gives summary, typical application areas, benefits, limitations, cost of use, and a detailed description of how to conduct a naturalistic observation
- http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~perlman/content/writing/researching.fieldnotes.html
When completing their observation, students will need to take field notes. This website provides a great explanation of how to take accurate field notes. The three major elements this site says must be included in good field notes are; initial impressions, key events or incidents, and range or variation of incidents. Students could use this site as a resource to better understand how to exactly write their field notes.
- http://gse.gmu.edu/research/tr/TRcomparison.shtml#Q&Q
Students in this course need to be able to compare and contrast quantitative and qualitative research, in order to realize when it is better to use one method over another. This website explains both, and contains a chart which compares the two. Topics of comparison on the chart include; purpose, reality, viewpoints, values, focus, orientation, data, instrumentation, conditions, and results.
