Using Technology to Conduct Research in
Education
Dianne A. Wright
Abstract—Technology has changed the way technology. Traditional research methods
research is conducted by academicians in all involve extensive photocopying of paper-
disciplines. Unfortunately, however, the based journals and books and note-taking.
availability of research on this topic in the
field of education, where one is more likely to Today’s twenty-first century research
find instructional technology as the focus of methods demand the use and knowledge of
related research studies, is a problem. The the Internet to access indices and abstracts(
author recommends solutions to this problem e.g., [formerly] ERIC, Psychological
including not only an increased focus on the abstracts, etc.). Further, the World Wide
availability of such technologies, but also the Web has the capacity to combine
extent to which these technologies are used
by educators as well as their perspectives characteristics of existing media (e.g., print,
regarding concomitant advantages and audio, and video) with a number of new
disadvantages. The fact that such critical attributes including hypertextuality
technologies are coming into existence as and interactivity (Newhagen & Rafaeli,
fast as they can be documented, while but 1996). In addition, electronic or online
one limitation noted, is more reason for survey system software packages are now
comparative analyses that can be used to
inform next generation technologies. available – offering sophisticated
questionnaire logic features.
Index Terms- Internet, World Wide Web, It is now increasingly common for a faculty
research, educational policy analysis. member to use remote data bases,
exchange e-mail globally, collaborate on
research, and get copies of the latest
1. INTRODUCTION journals all online. The “new scholar” on the
T HE Internet or World Wide Web (www)
emerged in the 1990s as an important
internet uses distant libraries, meets new
colleagues online, and exchanges ideas and
knowledge in real time with academics
new source of mediated messaging around the world. No longer are they bound
(Neuendorf, 2002). Subsequently, research to traditional hard copy journals and books.
and scholarship in higher education has The extent to which scholars in Education
changed. Interestingly, however, very little
are using the full array of available
has been written on this topic by academics
technology resources to conduct academic
in Education. In fact, no related research
research, however, begs for empirical
studies can be found in the literature. The perspectives, not to mention perceived
latter is particularly significant in comparison advantages and disadvantages or
to the volumes that have been written effectiveness of these transforming
related to this topic in other disciplines and technologies. The purpose of this article is to
the amount of research that is reported in begin to address this gap.
Education in the area of instructional
Manuscript received August 31, 2004. 2. TECHNOLOGY UTILIZATION
Dianne A. Wright, is an Associate Professor with the Utilization of the Internet and related
Educational Leadership Department, Florida Atlantic
University, USA. (dwright@FAU.edu). technologies to conduct academic research
can be organized into three broad
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categories: (1) information and data to the Internet via a web server. 2WAYs
collection, (2) data, statistical, and text intelligently gather feedback through multiple
analysis, and (3) results communication. user-defined logic paths. Using this logic, a
2WAY interaction responds to user feedback
Information and Data Collection with new questions and elements based on
their responses, helping to tailor content to
Electronic mail (e-mail) is the most wide individual recipients (http:// www.2way. com/
spread internet/technology service used by products/is/what.htm.).
all academics. In addition to its obvious use Perseus, represents yet another web-
for sending and receiving messages, e-mail based survey software system available to
has become the basis for what are many academic researchers. The survey
other academic research related activities. processor can run on any server operating
There are, for example, discipline specific system (OS), enabling each organizational
discussion groups that use automated unit to use the server OS that best fits its
systems to transmit and receive e-mail needs (e.g., Perl, Java, Python.net). Survey
messages from one person and then results can be managed in Oracle, SQL,
automatically to everyone else on a server, Sybase, or DB2, enabling
designated list. E-mail can also be used to institutions and faculty to use their current
get files from file transfer protocol (FTP) database standard (http:www.perseus.com).
sites, find resources through various search
engines, and get information from databases Data, Statistical, and Text Analysis
(Ellsworth, 1997, p. 506).
In addition, several electronic (online) Most web-based survey systems can also
journals have come into existence over the be used to analyze research data.
last decade. Academics serve as editors Respondent data can be formatted to
and referees for these online journals, and contain bar charts, pie charts, and itemized
receive and critique articles using e-mail. lists of text responses representing both
Also, opportunities for collaboration in aggregate and individually collected data
developing thematic journals and writing (http://www.2way.com/products/is/what.htm,
articles at a distance has become increasing http://www.perseus.com/survey/news/releas
common and many paper-based journals e_efm_trade.html;http://www.surveysystem.
now allow electronic submission of text com/websurveys.htm).
using the Internet (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 414). Most academic researchers are very
On-line surveys can also be conducted familiar with electronic versions of SPSS
using e-mail or web survey software for and SAS, particularly in Education. In
purposes of information and data collection. addition to the typical SPSS and SAS
E-mail surveys involve sending a survey to a software programs, SIMSTAT for Windows:
list of individuals who then reply with their Simulation and Statistics, v2.5 might also be
answers. Web-based surveys involve considered. SIMSTAT is a statistics program
posting a questionnaire on a web page that that provides for the conducting of a wide
potential respondents visit. range of statistical analyses of a descriptive
These software systems are interactive. nature including cross-tabs, t-tests,
They present and gather information from ANOVA/ANCOVA correlations, linear,
respondents through standard web browsers nonlinear and multiple regression analyses,
and store the data in e.g., an Oracle ® or time-series, and reliability, etc. SIMSTAT,
Microsoft® SSQL Server™ database. however, goes beyond mere statistical
Examples include the 2WAY survey system analysis. It offers output management
currently being piloted at the University of features as well as its own scripting
Akron in Akron, Ohio and Perseus being language to augment statistical analysis and
piloted at Florida Atlantic University in Boca write small applications, interactive tutorials
Raton, Florida. with multimedia capabilities, and computer
2Way is a JavaScript™ application assisted interviewing systems.
embedded in an HTML document, deployed (http://www.exetersoftware.com/cat/simstat.
91
html;http://www.simstat.com/simw.htm ) The education literature. Empirical evidence of
2Way Survey Interactive System as well as how these differential technologies have
Perseus, mentioned earlier, also provide for impacted the work the education policy
automated statistical analysis. In addition to analyst, also remains unknown.
web-based questionnaires, Perseus allows
for telephone-based interviews with sound Communicating Research Results
and graphic images, and has a report
“indexer” (an add-on function) that can be E-mail and Web-based surveys
used for purposes of benchmarking. No such as 2Way and Perseus Interactive
where in the literature, however, did the systems allow for respondent data to be
researcher find any studies of the extent to published as HTML reports, research
which these various technology resources articles, or be exported to third-party analytic
are actually being used by faculty tools for purposes of report writing and
researchers in education. preparing for dissemination. Using these
In addition, quantitative computer text technologies, resulting reports and research
analysis software is available. As early as articles can also be formatted to contain bar
1997, Skalski (p. 225) provided a listing of charts, pie charts, and itemized lists of text
quantitative text analysis programs and responses representing both aggregate and
highlighted key features of each. Most of individual views of collected data. It is also
these software programs as identified by noted that it is becoming more
Skalski (1997) were able to perform commonplace for such reports and research
quantitative and or qualitative text analysis articles to be published online in electronic
functions such as the development of journals.
alphabetical lists, frequency lists, multi-unit In terms of citing references, End Notes
data file output in (case-by-case) variable represents one of many software packages
form, key word in context (KWIC) or available for citing references once research
concordance, coding with a built in findings are written and prepared for
(standard) dictionary, and coding with a publication. Again, however, no empirical
user-created (custom) dictionary as well as research has been published that describes
other special analyses. the extent to which education researchers
After WWII, the development of the digital use or do not use this or similar software.
computer sparked widespread interest Empirical evidence in terms of advantages
particularly in formal, quantitative and disadvantages, along with
computerized models to convert “soft” recommendations identifying more
problems into “hard” ones. Subsequently, a contemporary product software could prove
new breed of technical practitioners came invaluable to the educational researcher.
into being, including policy researchers who
began to use formal computerized modeling Limits To Using Technology to Conduct
techniques to address economic, business, Academic Research in Education
and social policy in addition to e.g.,
differential and inferential statistics. There are limits, however, in terms of
As noted by Gill and Sanders (1992), using technology to conduct academic
statistical methodologies such as multiple research in Education. One limitation is
correlation, log-linear modeling, and analysis costs. Technology infrastructure continues
of variance can provide valuable insights to need more funds. Colleges of Education
into relationships among variables in the are being required to spend huge amounts
policy environment. Such work has come to of their budgets on computer-related
be more specifically referred to by support. A second limitation is time for
educational policy researchers as “policy training and education. In addition to
analysis.” A listing of related differential Education faculty typically carrying greater
technologies available to and/or used by the teaching loads than faculty in the so called
education policy analyst also remain, “hard” disciplines, they are also held to
however, conspicuously absent in the traditional research and service
92
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