Doing Qualitative Research

The author takes readers on a journey of a large number of issues in designing actual studies of knowing and learning in the classroom, exploring actual data, and putting readers face to face with problems that he actually or possibly encountered, and what he has done or possibly could have done. The reader subsequently sees the results of data collection in the different analyses provided. The author shows how one writes very different studies using the same data sources but very different theoretical assumptions and analytic technique. The author brings his publication experience in very different disciplines-including science education, mathematics education, teacher education, curriculum, applied cognitive science, linguistics, social studies of science, and epistemology-into play to provide readers with way of experiencing research as praxis. The book is organized around six major themes (sections), in the course of which it develops the practical problems an educational researcher might face in a large variety of settings. In Part A, Collecting Data, the author introduces design experiments and ethnographic designs; in Part B, Analyzing Data, finding the right zoom level and focus, cognitive phenomenology, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis constitute the organizing themes. For each theme, the author uses one of his extensive databases to draw on examples, problems, decisions, solutions, and so on. The book was written to be used by upper undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in research design; because of its practical approach, it is highly suitable for those contexts where research methods courses do not exist. The audience also includes professors, who want to have a reference on design and methodology, and those who have not yet had the opportunity to employ a particular method.