A guide to Educational research

This text is a guide to doing qualitative research in Education.In the first part of this work, I explore the nature of three methodologies used in educational research: the positivistic, the interpretive and the critical positions. This section will begin with a discussion of the educational scholar’s toolkit, including the distinction between methods, theories and approaches, the pros and cons of quantitative and qualitative approaches, the levels of analysis issue. This will be followed by a discussion of ontology, because it is chronologically and conceptually prior to the next step, epistemology In the second part of the article, I will critically assess two papers, reflecting different paradigms, and different ways of conducting educational research.