Quantitative Research Designs and Approaches

The overarching aim of science education research is to improve the quality of science instruction and foster students’ learning about science. Teachers want to know how they can guide individual students to learn about science and how they can teach a class of students about science. Head teachers want to know how to support the science faculty at their school to increase the average achievement of their students in science. Policymakers want to know how to allocate resources most efficiently in order to increase educational achievement across their district, state, or nation in order to support the development of economic and social affairs. Finally, researchers must be able to use the results of other researchers for their own investigations. However, to obtain findings that teachers, policymakers, researchers, and other stakeholders can rely upon, those findings need to be trustworthy. Therefore, certain quality measures have to be applied to investigations. Quality measures that are typically considered are objectivity, reliability, validity, and significance. This chapter details approaches to, and designs of, quantitative research in science education (multilevel designs), in order to obtain high-quality findings that are objective, reliable, and valid about science as well as respective framework conditions.