Research design provides the glue that holds the research project together. A design is used to structure the research, to show how all of the major parts of the research project -- the samples or groups, measures, treatments or programs, and methods of assignment -- work together to try to address the central research questions.
This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.
Welcome! This website is for people involved in applied social research and evaluation. You'll find lots of resources and links to other locations on the Web that deal in applied social research methods.
In most social research the data analysis involves three major steps, done in roughly this order:
Cleaning and organizing the data for analysis (Data Preparation)
Describing the data (Descriptive Statistics)
Testing Hypotheses and Models (Inferential Statistics)
Our on-line multilevel modelling course is now available: 'LEMMA' (The Learning Environment for Multilevel Methodology and Applications) contains a set of graduated modules starting from an introduction to quantitative research progressing to multilevel modelling of continuous data.
CONTEXT In education, tests are primarily used for
assessment, thus permitting teachers to assess the
efficacy of their curriculum and to assign grades.
However, research in cognitive psychology has shown
that tests can also directly affect learning by
promoting better retention of information, a
phenomenon known as the testing effect.