Every Researcher Should Know: Two Basic Types of Educational Psychology Research

Educational psychology is such a vast field within the realm of psychology. There are so many topics discussed within this field including learner’s motivation, learning disabilities, teacher instructional processes, and so on. This study aims to make educational process as inclusive and effective as possible so that the main objective of education can be attained: creating generations of lifelong kiu kiu online learners. Research is continuously done to keep up with the challenges in education. The challenges become more and more diverse as the society progresses over time.

Generally, there are two types of research in educational psychology: non-intervention and intervention research. As the names suggest, the difference between these two types of research is the presence of intervention. Intervention is defined as an action given to subject of research with the aim of improving or decreasing certain psychological or behavioral aspects. Although some people would argue that intervention research has more practical use, both types of research provide similar amount of contribution in this study field.
Non-intervention research has so many different varieties. First of all, you can use quantitative and qualitative approaches to do it. There is also a mixed method research which combines the two approaches into one coherent method. Non-intervention research is done to see how certain psychological variables in education relate to each other. People do this usually to get an early finding before they conduct intervention research. An example of this type of research is study of correlation between academic achievement and hours of instruction.

When an educational psychology researcher uses quantitative approach, they will employ statistical methods to see how variables are related or influencing each other. Nowadays, it can be done using various statistical programs such as SPSS and R Package. Quantitative research requires certain number of samples for generalizability. On the contrary, qualitative research studies smaller number of subjects because it does not aim for generalization. It obtains data from interviews, observations, and even literatures (unlike quantitative research which employs psychological scales or questionnaires). The qualitative data obtained are then interpreted according to theoretical framework and researcher’s own reasoning. https://territorioinsular.org/field-of-mathematics/
What about intervention research? This research is done to understand causal relationship between two or more variables. Less number of variables is considered ideals because it really helps educational psychology researcher understanding certain phenomenon a lot better. Intervention plays a huge part in this particular research type, thus designing it as well as possible is really important. In educational psychology research the forms of intervention are pretty diverse. You can find research that involves brain imaging and other lab-based actions. However, you can also find in-class type of intervention such as instructional methods and psycho-education.
Another important part when conducting intervention research is controlling the confounding factors. These factors are variables unrelated to the research design being employed but still influence any of the variables regardless. As an example, you are studying how reading out loud method influences student’s comprehension in reading.