“A system of general education, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest.”

- Thomas Jefferson

Education is one of the most important rising issues of the world. Whether the country is economically strong or weak, they are all trying to find ways to make education easily accessible to all. That is the reason why educational research is on the rise.

Three main types of educational research methodology are:

• Descriptive Research:
  This type of research aims to provide information regarding the conditions, events and situations that occur in the present. For example, a research that is being conducted on the present situation of a school building in order to develop a profile of the facilities it offers. In the field of education, this type of research commonly tries to compare the present facilities with variable factors like the national educational standard or conditions in other schools.
  For the research methodology, after the collection of the data comes the analysis part. For this particular type of research the statistical methodology generally used is called ‘univariate’ that tries to examine the means and percentages of the sample.
  Some basic example questions that will help you develop an education research methodology in this field are:
  • What are the factors that differentiate school facilities in two different regions of a country?
  • Are the schools in (insert particular region) operating according to the national benchmark?
• Co Relational Research:
  Co relational research is conducted to determine the relationship between two variables. For example, determining the relationship between a teacher’s job satisfaction level and job equity like salary, housing facilities etc that are provided by the school.
  In this case, the common statistical tool used for analysis is cross tabulation and correlation which can be found easily. The association that finds the relationship between two variables here is called ‘bivariate’ analysis.
  A basic example question in this field is:
  • Will students perform better academically if they are provided with more advanced schooling facilities?
• Casual Research:
  This type of research tries to determine the linkage between variables by observing present behavior and then searching through the past data for possible explanations and reasoning.
  Here, statistical tests are used to analyze if the performance of the variables is better than the outcome of the past.
  A basic example question in this field is:
  • What are the factors that contribute towards rising students drop out rate in colleges?

Hence, if you are conducting a research methodology in education, then make sure that you go through the above article to determine the method of research for your dissertation in the field of education.