NURS 350 DQ Quantitative Research Designs and Approaches
NURS 350 DQ Quantitative Research Designs and Approaches
DQ1 Describe quantitative research designs that are used to support changes in nursing practice. Choose one and explain why you chose it. Give an example of how this research design is used to drive change in nursing practices.
DQ2 What is the difference between statistical significance and clinical significance? Explain why statistically significant results in a study do not always mean that the study is clinically significant. Provide an example.
The overarching aim of science education research is to improve the quality of science instruction and foster students’ learning about science. Teachers want to know how they can guide individual students to learn about science and how they can teach a class of students about science. Principals and teachers, among others, want to know how to support the science faculty at their school to increase the average achievement of their students and to reduce the variance in achievement in science in comparison with other schools. Policymakers want to know how to allocate resources most efficiently in order to increase educational achievement across their district, state, or nation in relation to the development of economic and social affairs. Finally, researchers must be able to use the results of other re-searchers for their own investigations. However, to obtain findings that teachers, headmasters and policymakers can rely upon, the findings need to be trustworthy. Therefore, certain quality measures have to be applied to investigations. Quality measures that are typically considered are objectivity, reliability, and validity. This chapter details approaches to, and designs of, quantitative research in science Edu-cation, particularly the Rasch analysis as an example, in order to obtain high-quality findings that are objective, reliable, and valid about science as well as re-spective framework conditions.