Knowledge Building: A Good Way to Teach Educational Research Methodology

Abstract

Educational research skills are a relevant issue to education professionals. Knowing how to investigate makes it possible to generate knowledge to guide educational interventions and evaluations/assessments. An important aspect is to decide on the focus of training to develop research skills, both specific (e.g. formulating a research problem, collecting data, analysing data), and cross-cutting (working collaboratively). Knowledge Building (KB) pedagogy is a coherent approach to teach resarch skill. KB encourages sutdent asume the responsability to carry out collaborative process to build conceptual artefacts. The purpose of this communication is to train students in educational research skills applying the Knowledge Building pedagogy supporting by Knowledge Forum (KF). This platform offers students and teachers a collaborative workspace where ideas supported by evidence can be shared, discussed, negotiated and improved. A comapartive pretest-posttest design was applied to analyse whether students perceived improvements in their educational research skills. Likert scale questionnaires were applied to collect the data. The participants were 51 students enrolled in a course about educational research in Higher Education. The results show positive changes in the student’s perception between the beginning and the end of the course. Improvements in the teaching of educational research based on Knowledge Building Pedagogy are discussed.