Summary

Fantastic work, everyone, on completing the first week's topic on research methodology! 

• There are six ways in acquiring knowledge and they are through our beliefs, intuition, authority, empiricism, rationalism and science. 
• The word “research” has been used in many different ways and sometimes rather loosely, giving rise to confusion and sometimes with the intention to deceive. 
• Research is defined as the systematic, controlled, empirical and critical investigation of natural phenomena guided by theory and hypotheses on the presumed relations among the phenomena. 
• There are six characteristics of research, namely, begin with a question, plan, clear statement of the problem, main problem and sub-problem, appropriate hypotheses and facts.  
• Educational research is described as research that investigates the behaviour of students, teachers, administrators, parents and so forth. 
• The purpose of the scientific method is to describe, explain, control and predict phenomena. 
• The seven steps of the educational research process is a useful guide for beginning researchers to follow. It starts with generating research ideas, formulate research problem, develop a hypothesis, design study to test hypothesis, collect data, analyse interpret results and finally communicate result.  

Now, you've finished looking at what Research Methodology is all about and to grasp the module information, the topics we are going to learn, what the topics will cover. Congratulations! 

In the next topic, you will learn about Literature Review.