Primer of Educational Research

Most educators I know do not have any background in educational research. Dr. Suter does a fantastic job of introducing a new and unfamiliar topic in an understandable manner. I had absolutely no experience in the area of educational research or research in general, so every term was "Greek" to me. Dr. Suter uses clear examples in every chapter and each chapter builds nicely on knowledge learned from the previous chapters. I took Educational Research as a web course over the internet and have never even met Dr. Suter. This was my first web course in graduate school and I was so pleased at the amount of insight I now have in the area of educational research. I am far from being a researcher and I would still have some trouble deciding on whether or not a particular research report was reliable and valid, but I have enough knowledge to disregard sloppy work and maybe even enough to conduct a small scale research project in my own classroom or school district. This was just an introduction course and I feel I got an introduction plus some! The book is easy to read and assumes you know nothing about research. The only concept that Dr. Suter assumes you recognize is "standard deviation" and "bell curve." As educators, most would not have a problem with those terms. This book does not concentrate on the calculations and statistics - that would be for a more advanced research student. It does discuss how to set up a research project, types of research, how to control for extraneous (or other) variables, and how to tell if a particular report is valid and reliable. I enjoyed it so much I am taking another course by Dr. Suter via the web this next semester!