Assignment 3 Lauer Chapters 3 and 4

1. Explain the key differences between descriptive and
experimental research. 

The differences between experimental research and descriptive research is that experimental research is refer as “casual” research and descriptive as “nonexperimental” research. Experimental research is design to answer causal questions, such as “Does something cause an effect?” and descriptive research is design to answer research question. Some descriptive questions are “What is happening? How is something happening?” Descriptive research design include simple descriptive, comparative descriptive, and correlational; and experimental research design include true experimental and quasi-experimental. One characteristic that differs descriptive research is the design to collect data to describe persons and organizations and compare two or more groups; and experimental research the researcher manipulates the independent variables and randomly assigns the participants.


2. Explain correlational research.

Correlational research is describes and refers to the relationship between the two variables or more. Two variables can be a class size and mean reading score. Also, one of the correlational studies is bivariate correlation and the necessary pieces to interpret correlations are:
• The numerical value of the correlation coefficient.
• The sign of the correlation coefficient.
• The statistical significance of the correlation.
• The effect size of the correlation (taken from Appendix D).

3. Explain the key differences between quantitative and qualitative research.

The differences between quantitative and qualitative research is number data and narrative description. Quantitative research is based on number data and measurements, such as students’ scores. Qualitative research is based on the interviews and observations. Also, a case study is can be a qualitative data and later be turn into quantitative data to show the results.

4. What is action research?

Action research is research conducted by individuals either by one individual or a group (collaborative action). A teacher can conduct a research in her class and generalize the results of her class to other classes, which results cannot be reliable. A collaborative action the principal and other teacher can conduct the research and they can only generalize their answers in their school site and can’t be reliable results for other schools. Also, action research differs from other education research and has some limitations like rarely employing experimental methods and results are generalized.