Doing Your Education Research Project

'Doing Your Education Research Project' is aimed at education practitioners and attempts to guide novice researchers through the process of carrying out research; from planning to publishing. They usefully point out in the introduction, that teachers already have many skills which can be applied to research, such as the skills of observing, asking questions, project management and evaluation. These skills mean that no practitioner need feel that they are 'starting from scratch' (p. xi). This theme of using existing teaching skills to scaffold the development of research skills runs effectively throughout the book.

The book is divided into three sections: 1) Think before you do, 2) Planning and preparation, 3) Reporting - making sense of the outcomes. Each section is broken down into chapters with 12 in total. This concise text has plenty of suggestions for further reading and is written in plain English making it an accessible read.

In the first section I found chapter 1 on 'The benefits of practical research' particularly helpful with up-to-date background information on the place of research in teaching qualifications. Chapter 3 'Reviewing existing ideas' gives a good introduction on how to carry out a literature review although it may be have been helpful to reference examples of good reviews, since readers could learn much from seeing how other researchers have published their methods of review.

Section 2, the largest section of the book, covers research methods and planning. Its main premise is that 'the primary concern of practitioner research is generally considered to be the improvement of professional practice' (p.46). The book therefore focuses on methods applicable to this kind of research, namely observation, interviews and questionnaires, documents and diaries. Although occasional reference is made to group interviews, chapter 6 'How to ask - surveying the situation' would benefit from a paragraph on running focus groups. As you would expect, the authors provide a helpful introduction to action research (chapter 9); its closeness to reflective practice noted. The paragraph on 'caveats' of action research is especially useful (p.138), as the authors suggest ways to avoid the pitfalls of this kind of research.

Section 3, is perhaps surprisingly small given that the authors offer advice on how to analyse and present data. If the intention of the book is to build the confidence of novice researchers and to provide them with pointers of where to go to learn more about analysing data, then this section is adequate. Viewed in this light, the book makes a good stepping stone for practitioners to continue their research interests. Much of the advice in this section is sensible; for instance it was gratifying to see data represented mostly in 2D formats (yes it is easy to select 3D pie and bar charts and they look impressive, but they are so much harder to interpret)!

The final chapter includes a sub-section on using research outcomes to inform practice. In this practical section, the authors discuss how important practitioner research can be, in challenging preconceptions, overcoming inadequacies and identifying unforeseen issues in a wide range of areas in educational research. Thus the book ends on a positive note.

The strengths of this book lie in the sections dealing with planning and running research projects which provide useful case study examples relevant to education practitioners. Whilst the book cannot act as a stand-alone text for those carrying out their first research project (since the advice on data analyses is limited), it is still an approachable, well-designed and relatively thorough beginners' text.