Research Paradigms in Education

Abstract

This article brings an account into educational research and the impact on policy and practice. Research paradigms represent a crucial element in the research project as they influence both the strategy and the way the researchers construct and interpret the meaning of the reality. The research paradigms have a philosophical underpinning and orient the researchers’ point of view on the reality as given by nature or constructed by human agency. Depending on the research paradigm, the researchers have been for long divided into two camps: the tenants of the quantitative methods and the tenants of qualitative ones. They have been arguing from opposing stances which method is superior. The quantitative method privilege the numbers, while the qualitative uses the words, therefore it seems like a war of numbers versus words. Lately, a third way is advocating for a mixed methodology, as more beneficial to research. The paper concludes that the different perspectives of research can be considered more as complementing rather than contradicting each other. The paper considers the implications of research on education and the role of research for professional development and educational practice.

DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n1p407