ABM Grade 12 Modules and activities! 2022-2023

Practical Research II part1

INQUIRY vs. RESEARCH: A REVIEW

Nature of Inquiry and Research

One goal of education is knowledge acquisition. However, education is not just stocking your brain with knowledge, but it also encourages you to use acquired knowledge for a deeper understanding of the world-an understanding that inspires
you to create, construct, or produce things for the betterment of not only your own life, but of the whole world as well. How is this possible?

Inquiry, a term that is synonymous with the word 'investigation,' is the answer to this question. When you inquire or investigate, you tend to ask questions to probe or examine something. You do this kind of examination through your HOTS
or higher-order thinking strategies of inferential, analytical, critical, creative, and appreciative thinking to discover more understandable or meaningful things beyond such object of your inquiry. Thinking in this manner makes you ask open-
ended questions to elicit views, opinions, and beliefs of others in relation to your research. (Small 2012)

Characteristics of Research

Research is a scientific, experimental, or inductive manner of thinking. Starting from particular to more complex ideas, you execute varied thinking acts that range
from lower-order to higher-order thinking strategies reflected by these research activities: identifying the topic or problem, gathering data, making theories, formulating hypotheses, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions. Cognitively
driven terms like empirical, logical, cyclical, analytical, critical, methodical, and replicable are the right descriptive words to characterize research. These powerful modifiers that your previous research subject, Practical Research 1, explained to a certain extent, are the very same terms to characterize any quantitative research you intend to carry out this time. The data you work on in research do not come mainly from yourself but also from other sources of knowledge like people, books, and artworks, among others. Hence, one cardinal principle in research is to give acknowledgment to owners of
all sources of knowledge involved in your research work. Giving credit to people from whom you derived your data is your way of not only thanking the authors of their contribution to the field, but also establishing the validity and reliability of the findings of your research that ought to serve as instrument for world progress.
(Muijs 2011; Ransome 2012)

Methods of Research

To be a researcher is to be a scientist, who must think logically or systematically; that is, your research activities must follow a certain order, like doing inductive thinking
that makes you ponder on specific ideas first, then move to more complex concept like conclusions or generalizations. Or, do the opposite of inductive thinking which
is deductive thinking that lets you start from forming generalizations to examining details about the subject matter. These are not the only approaches, though, that you
can adhere to in planning your research work. Depending on your topic and purpose, you are free to choose from several approaches, methods, and types of research you
learned in your previous research subject, Practical Research 1. (Gray 2011; Sharp 2012)

Inquiry vis-à-vis Research

One scholarly activity that greatly involves inquiry is research. Similar to inquiry that starts from what you are ignorant about, research makes you learn something by means of a problem-solving technique. Both inquiry and research encourage you
to formulate questions to direct you to the exact information you want to discover about the object of your curiosity. Your questions operate like a scrutiny of a person's attire to find out what are hidden between or among the compartments or folded
parts of his/her clothes. Although the core word for both inquiry and research is investigation or questioning, they are not exactly the same in all aspects. Research includes more complex acts of investigation than inquiry because the former follows a scientific procedure of discovering truths or meanings about things in this world.
(Goodwin 2014; Lapan 2012)

Definition of Quantitative Research

Expressions like numerical forms, objective thinking, statistical methods, and measurement signal the existence of quantitative research. One word that reflects the
true nature of this type of research is numerical. This term, numerical, is a descriptive word pertaining to or denoting a number or symbol to express how many, how much,
or what rank things are or have in this world. Expressing meaning through numerals or a set of symbols indicates specificity, particularity, or exactness of something

Quantitative research makes you focus your mind on specific things by means of statistics that involve collection and study of numerical data. Thus, to give the basic meaning of quantitative research is to say that research is a way of making any
phenomenon or any sensory experience clearer or more meaningful by gathering and
examining facts and information about such person, thing, place, or event appealing to your senses. You use mathematical operations of addition, subtraction, division, and
multiplication to study and express relationships between quantities or magnitudes shown by numbers or symbols. Involving measurements and amounts, quantitative
research seeks to find answers to questions starting with how many, how much, how long, to what extent, and the like. Answers to these questions come in numerals,
percentages, and fractions, among others. (Suter 2012; Russell 2013)

Characteristics

Since quantitative research uses numbers and figures to denote a particular thing, this kind of research requires you to focus your full attention on the object of your study. Doing this, you tend to exclude your own thoughts and feelings about the subject or object. This is why quantitative research is described as objective research in contrast to qualitative research that is subjective. Characterized by objectiveness, in which only
the real or factual, not the emotional or cognitive existence of the object matters greatly to the artist, quantitative research is analogous to scientific or experimental thinking.
In this case, you just do not identify problems but theorize, hypothesize, analyze, infer, and create as well. Quantitative research usually happens in hard sciences like
physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine; qualitative research, in soft sciences such as humanities, social sciences, education, and psychology, among others.

Classification

Quantitative research is of two kinds: experimental and non-experimental.

Each of these has sub-types. Falling under experimental are these specific types: true experimental, quasi-experimental, single subject, and pre-experimental.
Quasi-experimental comes in several types such as: matched comparative group, time series, and counterbalanced quasi-experimental. Non-experimental research, on
the other hand, has these sub-types: survey, historical, observational, correlational, descriptive, and comparative research.

Importance

The importance of quantitative research lies greatly in the production of results that should reflect precise measurement and an in-depth analysis of data. It is also
useful in obtaining an objective understanding of people, things, places, and events in this world; meaning, attaching accurate or exact meanings to objects or subjects, rather than inflated meanings resulting from the researcher's bias or personal attachment to things related to the research. Requiring the use of reliable measurement instruments or statistical methods, a quantitative study enables people to study their surroundings as objective as they can. This kind of research is likewise an effective method to obtain information about specified personality traits of a group member or of the group as a whole as regards the extent of the relationship of their characteristics and the reason behind the instability of some people's characteristics. (Muijs 2011; Gray 2012)

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research

Having obtained much knowledge about qualitative and quantitative research, you are now able to compare and contrast the two based on some standards or criteria
appearing in the following table. (Muijs 2011; Sharp 2012)

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