EDDD 8113 Dis1

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  Colleague Susan Gifford Post

     I am interested in researching parental involvement in education and its effect on achievement.  I believe that no matter what their socioeconomic status, parent involvement in education is one of the biggest factors affecting achievement. I have seen it even more clearly this past year as a digital learning teacher.  In her 2019 study, Otani wrote “The results show that parental involvement is associated with students’ educational outcomes. Students’ attitudes and aspirations mediate the associations between parental involvement and academic achievement.”

            The philosophical orientation that reflects my worldview is pragmatism.  Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998 stated “As a research paradigm, pragmatism is based on the proposition that researchers should use the philosophical and/or methodological approach that works best for the particular research problem that is being investigated.”  The epistemological assumption of pragmatism is that knowledge is based on experience.  People’s social experiences influence their views.  Kauskik & Walsh (2019) wrote:

Each person’s knowledge is unique as it is created by her/his unique experiences. Nevertheless, much of this knowledge is socially shared as it is created from socially shared experiences. Therefore, all knowledge is social knowledge (Morgan 2014a). While two people can have a shared experience, the knowledge from that experience may be slightly different due to how each individual perceives the experience.

            The ontology of pragmatism is to solve real-world problems. I believe that parental involvement in schools is a real-world problem. 

References

Kaushik, V., & Walsh, C. A. (2019). Pragmatism as a research paradigm and its implications for social work research. Social Sciences, 8(9), 255.

Morgan, D. L. (2014). Pragmatism as a Paradigm for Social Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(8), 1045–1053. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800413513733

Otani, M. Parental involvement and academic achievement among elementary and middle school students. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 21, 1–25 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-019-09614-z

Tashakkori, A., Teddlie, C., & Teddlie, C. B. (1998). Mixed methodology: Combining qualitative and quantitative approaches (Vol. 46). Sage.

Timothy Lafferty  INSTRUCTOR MANAGER 

Reply and Response to Susan Gifford

Susan, thank you for getting things started here with the first post. You have made a clear statement of your philosophical orientation, but your epistemological and ontological assumptions are unclear. You did not state your assumptions of ontology (realist vs. relativist) or epistemology (positivism, scientific facts vs. social constructivism, interpretation).  For more information about ontological and epistemological assumptions, see Burkholder et al. (2020, pp. 15-23). The assumptions you align with will guide your choice of research approaches which you did not identify. 

Your statement appears to lean toward qualitative research; however, you opening statement about your research interest signifies a quantitative approach.  Please explain.