Understanding and Interpreting Educational Research

I loved how concise and effective these authors were in this text. I learned a lot! Also, they seamlessly synthesized across different chapters.

I liked this book and received it within a few days.

The usefulness of this book as a pedagogical tool depends entirely on its intended purpose and audience. Its title, "Understanding and Interpreting Educational Research" provides some guidance. The title suggests that the book is aimed primarily at would be consumers of research rather than at would-be researchers. Though the publisher's description boasting a "learn-by-doing approach" suggests a greater emphasis on the actual practice of research, the former conclusion is more in line with the book's contents. The book is a remarkably complete description of a variety of research processes and methodologies ranging from the qualitative to the quantitative and (surprisingly, compared to other books on research methods I've read) even single-case designs. The book is not, however, a guide for the actual practitioner of these methods.The book excels in its extensive discussions of validity. Each research design is given its own chapter and each chapter includes a fairly detailed discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the method in terms of validity. Potential threats to validity are catalogued, as are methods researchers might use to mitigate some of those threats. While this information is useful for both consumers and producers of research, the focus is primarily on the consumers. The information is provided in the context of critically examining published research before forming opinions of its believability.Where the book falls down a bit is in its treatment of statistical techniques. While it does discuss proper interpretations of p-values and effect sizes and a variety of other statistics, and it does include a few useful equations, its almost entirely devoid of the details of the statistical methods themselves. I suspect the authors would argue that the step-by-step mathematical discussions are beyond the scope of the book because they have to do with research production rather than research interpretation, but I would respectfully disagree. Admittedly, I'm biased (coming, as I do, from a mathematical background), but to me, it's impossible to really and truly understand--even conceptually--a statistical technique until one understands the mathematics at its foundation.If you're looking for guidance on conducting research of your own, this book might help you select an appropriate technique to use, but will not help you learn how to use it. Similarly, if you're looking for guidance on research interpretation, this book will be a godsend when it comes to understanding the reasons researchers used specific techniques, but won't help you very much at the fine-resolution task of determining whether the technique was correctly applied. This is particularly important for statistical research where even the slightest deviance from the stated assumptions of some statistical test can have profound impacts on the study's outcome.The book's preface indicates that it is intended for advanced undergraduate or master's students or, with supplementary material, for doctoral-level students. I think this is incorrect. While the book is undoubtedly a good reference for students (or even professionals) at any level of education due to its fairly-detailed treatments of a wide variety of methods, I think the authors either underestimate the sophistication of students at several levels of education or institutional standards have fallen too far. I would recommend this book to students as early as high school (for relatively advanced students) and would expect any undergraduate in a research or education major to have mastered its material long before graduation. Indeed, many students, beginning at the undergraduate level and certainly at the graduate level, will find much of the book's contents already familiar. This is a good thing, and isn't a reason not to purchase the book. Even material over which I have considerable mastery still has a place in my reference library, if for no other reason than to check an occasional detail. However, even at the undergraduate level, I would begin supplementing this book with additional readings, particularly concerning the statistical techniques.Overall, I consider this to be a highly useful but incomplete book. Professors teaching a course on research methods would be well-advised to assign it, but they would be similarly well-advised to accompany it with a text on statistics appropriate to the students' level of sophistication.

Very promising. The content can be rich, but sometimes not very accessible to the reader and dense. Chapter 6 on causal-comparative design is a great example. I look forward to the next edition.