| This website, created 2007 – present by William Ellery Samuels, Ph.D., is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. |
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The following are resources for our section and for conducting education research—even without access to a university&rquo;s resources.
The site most relevant to our course. This site contains a link to the IRB review process, which includes a mini course you will have to complete and a Word version of the application for conducting research.
Along with links to AERA’s ethical standards and a couple of purchasable books, this site contains a link to the Social and Behavioral Sciences Working Group on Human Research Protections, an “interdisciplinary group of scientists established to examine and suggest ways to enhance the protection of human subjects in the social and behavioral sciences.”
Since both fields share many of the same issues, types of research, and goals, much research in education follows the tenets of psychological research. The two fields share very similar ethical concerns as well.
Although less likely, it’s possible any research you wish to conduct will fall under the purview of the National Association of Social Workers.
Online Search Engines (besides Google).
Not 100% current, it’s still a good table of information
(Never thought there was so much to know about search engines, didja? Never knew it’d matter, either, I’m sure.)
A well-organized site with lots to offer.
General Online Resources for Research
A search directory first created in a graduate library course at the University of Michigan, the Internet Public Library has well-organized links to many, informative websites.
Reported to be the oldest catalogue of the Web, the WWW Virtual Library is maintained by a loose collection of volunteers who each help care for their area of expertise on the site.
Another nicely-organized search directory
Self-reported to be quick access to thousands of educational resources, GEM’s mission is to allow educators to help educators and to “to improve the organization and accessibility of the substantial collections of materials that are already available on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites.”
Sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), ERIC is the largest online collection of education-related resources. An excellent source of both scholarly and lay publications. In contains enough scholarly resources (over 600 journals as of 2008), I nearly (but didn’t) included it in the “Specific” section, below.
A massive collection of reference materials and facts.
Specific Resources for Research
“The mission of IES is to provide rigorous evidence on which to ground education practice and policy.”
“A central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education.”
“[T]he primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.” The site contains lots of good info, especially the annual reports like the Condition of Education and the Digest of Education Statistics. This site and ERIC are superb places to begin—and maybe even finish—literature searches.
“A categorized list of sites useful for enhancing curriculum and professional growth. It is updated often to include the best sites for teaching and learning.”
A very thorough compilation of information and links about action research prepared by Southern Cross University in Australia.
As a college student, you have access to an immense selection of scholarly journals with which to whet your skills. However, as soon as you leave this ivory tower, nearly all of that knowledge will be closed to you. So much for professional development beyond some after-school workshop on using PowerPoint to make slide shows of your class’s trip to the local sewage treatment plant.
Fortunately, there are some journals that allow unwashed non-academics to open their hallowed covers. Here are the ones I know of.
The Directory of Open Access Journals quite laudably offers a wide range of “free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.” The link given here jumps to the social science section.
Another organization working to open up research is SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access). SHERPA works to create open access repositories at universities in the United Kingdom. On their website are links to these, as well as to OpenDOAR, an “an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.”
Most of the articles in ERIC and other such collections are not open access. Some, however, are. To find them, first click on the Advanced Search link; then click in the box to select “Full-Text Availability: Check this box to limit your results to records for which ERIC has permission to post the full text.”
Young Children—the peer-reviewed journal of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)—admirably releases a few of its articles to the general public.
In the July 30, 2008, issue of Education Week, it was announced that Stanford University’s faculty voted to allow most their articles to be avialable to the general public. This hasn’t been implemented yet, but should sometime this fall. I’ll post the new info here when I know it.
People’ve always needed a good measure of common sense to sift through the things they were told to find the good and reject the bad. However, things have certainly changed with the Information Revolution. Anyone savvy enough to create a snappy blog can be an information broker to a potential audience of millions. “Cool Facts” forwarded to friends and families through email forwards have made many of us now believe that half of all marriages end in divorce, goldfish can only remember things for 2 seconds, and . Never useless, information literacy has nonetheless become an even more important skill as information has become so widely available and publicly created.
An easy-to-use guide for evaluating different types of information, including .
Resources for teachers to help their students develop information literacy
Resources for working with other community organizations to enhance information literacy.
Located on a site “[d]edicated to 12 million Holocaust victims who suffered and died at the hands of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime,” this is a rather thorough list of various logical fallacies with concrete examples of each.
Also on the home page is a link to a readable article on constructing a logical argument.
An extensive and understandable list of fallacies organized by type.
Another list of many fallacies, I find the description on the main page of fallacies very good.
Methods and Statistics Information and Tutorials
“The Research Methods Knowledge Base is a comprehensive web-based textbook that addresses all of the topics in a typical introductory undergraduate or graduate course in social research methods. It covers the entire research process including: formulating research questions; sampling (probability and nonprobability); measurement (surveys, scaling, qualitative, unobtrusive); research design (experimental and quasi-experimental); data analysis; and, writing the research paper. It also addresses the major theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of research including: the idea of validity in research; reliability of measures; and ethics.” Truly an amazingly useful website! I could see using this instead of a textbook for this class.
An articles published in Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation by Elizabeth Fanning of the University of Virginia, “[t]his paper summarizes best practices with regard to paper-based survey questionnaire design. Initial design considerations, the cover and cover page, directions, ordering of questions, navigational path (branching), and page design are discussed.”
Statistics Decision Maps and Online Calculators
An utterly amazing collection of links to sites about statistics, that help you decide which stats to conduct, and that will conduct them for you. The author of this site, John Pezzullo, retired from the Departments of Pharmacology and Biostatistics at Georgetown University and consulted with many companies about biostatistics. There isn’t much regarding basic descriptive and inferential statistics that you won’t find here. Having so much available, it’s worth pointing out some of the resources that are most pertinent to our course:
A statistics text book I own (Harshbarger’s (1977) Introductory Statistics: A Decision Map) is organized much like this decision tree. I loved the format so much, I planned on translating the pith of that text online. However, I’m very happy to say this site has made my intended efforts unnecessary. Another site linked to, Selecting Statistics presents a similar statistics decision map.
It’s important to note, however, that this site will not help you design a study; statistics should follow designs—never the other way around. In addition, this site addresses the inferential statistics used to test hypotheses. The descriptive, data-exploring statistics one conducts around the hypothesis tests are not addressed here. In any case, do make sure you read the cautionary notes associated with the decision tree.
A quite easy-to-use online tool to create pie charts or bar, line, area, or XY graphs.
Part of Statistics Canada’s Learning Resources site, this page (and the ones that immediately follow it on their site) explain the basic types of graphs. There is also a flexible online graph creator.
Beautifully prepared and presented by Daniel Soper, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at Mihaylo College of Business and Economics“[t]hese statistics calculators are free to be used by anyone in the research community at large. They are offered humbly in the hope that they will contribute in some small way to the advancement of science.”
Another impressive compilation of online stat calculators, some of these choices are less commonly available elsewhere (and perhaps less likely used by you). Nonetheless, these selections help round out the offerings.
Yet another impressive compilation of online stat calculators. Has a nice variety of types of calculations.
Dice seem to lack credibility in the world of science, where online random number generators hold court. This one “designed for researchers and students who want a quick way to generate random numbers or assign participants to experimental conditions. Research Randomizer can be used in a wide variety of situations, including psychology experiments, medical trials, and survey research.”
An easy-to-use online effect size calculator from Lee Becker of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. I used Prof. Becker’s clear (and detailed) lecture on effect size as the link to explain effect size in the heading of this little group of links.
“The spreadsheet consists of two sheets: Calculator, in which data are entered and values calculated, and Graph, which plots the effect size estimate and its confidence intervals.”
“This Sample Size Calculator is presented as a public service of Creative Research Systems. You can use it to determine how many people you need to interview in order to get results that reflect the target population as precisely as needed.”
Confidence interval and confidence level—used in this calculation—are further defined here.
A quick, Word-document list of how to format various types of references along American Psychological Association’s guidelines. Nice and compact reference.
Purdue’s “O.W.L.” is a great source of information about writing a paper meeting the American Psychological Association’s guidelines. The additional resources is also a wonderful area for info on formatting and writing your paper. The additional resources area also has sample papers, citation rules, etc.
“Conclusion: While overstating the results and applying the wrong statistics can be fixed, other problems that the reviewers identified (ignoring the literature, designing poor studies, choosing inappropriate instruments, and writing poor manuscripts) are likely to be fatal flaws warranting rejection.”
Easy-to-read guidelines for presenting research.
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| This website, created 2007 – present by William Ellery Samuels, Ph.D., is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. |
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