TEST BANK for Educational Research: Fundamental Principles and Methods 8th Ed, by James H. McMillan

Chapter 1 Application Exercises Chapter 1: Introduction to Research in Education Application Exercise 1.1: Qualitative or Quantitative? Learning Outcome 1.5: Distinguish among key characteristics of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods types of research. [Q1] Can you distinguish between qualitative and quantitative data? Rachelle J. is a middleand high-school language arts and Spanish student teacher. She conducted a research project addressing the effects of formative assessment on participants’ summative assessment scores, morale, and attitude. Read through Rachelle’s report of her research, focusing specifically on the methodology sections of the paper and answer the following questions: What is Rachelle’s first research question? Did Rachelle collect qualitative data, quantitative data, or both? [Q1 Model Response] Her first question is, Do formative assessments motivate students to study harder? To answer this question, she conducted observations and kept field notes (qualitative data). She also collected survey data, which can be qualitative or quantitative, depending on the survey—she does not say directly. Because she is focused on student perspectives, qualitative data would be appropriate here. Moreover, she says she asked students “whether or not they studied more because of the weekly quizzes” and does NOT say something like, “I asked them to agree or disagree on a scale of 1 to 5.” As you will see in a later chapter, scales of that sort are used in quantitative studies. As you become more experienced at reading research articles, you will be able to tell from her description of methodology and especially her data analysis that she used qualitative measures, even though she has “numbers” in her results. [Q2] Can you distinguish between qualitative and quantitative data? Rachelle J. is a middleand high-school language arts and Spanish student teacher. She conducted a research project addressing the effects of formative assessment on participants’ summative assessment scores, morale, and attitude. Read through Rachelle’s report of her research, focusing specifically on the methodology sections of the paper and answer the following questions: What is Rachelle’s second research question? Did Rachelle collect qualitative data, quantitative data, or both? 15 Copyright © 2022 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved.