Welcome! This guide is designed to help students, faculty, and researchers at Syracuse University who want to research topics in Education, navigate the essential tools, strategies, and resources involved in academic research. Whether you’re just getting started with a project or refining an advanced research plan, you’ll find guidance here on how to find quality sources, develop your topic, and use library collections effectively.
Research in education often reflects evolving terminology and deeply embedded assumptions about teaching, learning, equity, and access. You may encounter older materials that use dated or less inclusive language (for example, “disabled students,” “handicapped,” “remedial education”), or educational policy reports from past decades that do not reflect current understandings of equity or diversity. We encourage you to approach sources with a critical lens: note when language reflects its historical moment, who is represented and who might be missing, and how you might articulate more inclusive terminology in your own work. While the majority of the resources listed here are in English and U.S-centered, if you are pursuing multilingual or international education research, contact your librarian for help identifying global databases.
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For information on the Libraries Search, visit Libraries Search Information.
This concise, applied, and very clearly written introduction to qualitative research methods can be used effectively in a semester, or year-long course. The purpose of this introductory-level text is to provide the reader with a background for understanding the uses of qualitative research in education to examine its theoretical and historical underpinnings, and to provide the "how-to's" of doing qualitative research. This new edition places qualitative research within current debates about research methods and alternative ways of knowing. While the authors approach the subject from a sociological perspective, they also take care to reflect the many changes in conceptualization of qualitative research brought by post-structural and feminist thought.
Educational Research is a comprehensive introductory research methods textbook for upper level undergraduate and graduate students. Readers will develop an understanding of the multiple research methods and strategies used in education and related fields, the ability to read and critically evaluate published research, and the ability to write a proposal, construct a questionnaire, and conduct an empirical research study on their own.
A focused reference resource that explores the lexicon of two profoundly interrelated areas.