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When beginning to read a research article, it is always best to skim the article, focusing your attention on the following:
- the title,
- the abstract, and
- the major headings through the article.
The title should be indicative of the focus of the research study and subsequent article. The abstract characteristically provides a brief overview of the main questions being investigated, the population being studied, the main variables involved, and the most salient findings. The title and abstract, along with the major headings of the report, will typically give you a nice "roadmap" for reading the study in its entirety.
The next step is to read the article (yes, the whole article!), using your newly created roadmap (i.e., your overview of the article) to guide you. By the time you finish reading the article, there are basically three questions you should be able to answer. These are:
- What is the research study about (i.e., what was its topic or focus)?
- How was the research conducted (i.e., what methods were used)?
- What were the findings of the research (i.e., what were the results and what did the authors conclude)?
By now, you are undoubtedly familiar with the main sections of most research articles. These are:
- Introduction
- Literature Review/Related Information
- Methods
- Results
- Conclusions and Recommendations
Here are the main purposes of each section, and what you should focus your attention on in each.
- Introduction
This section provides several important features of a research article. The authors will typically provide some background to the topic (e.g., why this is an important topic, worthy of investigation), as well as the purpose of the study. They may also provide a justification for actually conducting the study. Authors may also identify to whom the results of the study may be of interest. This section also typically includes the research questions and/or hypotheses. In some research articles, you may also find sections discussing any limitations or delimitations to the study and definitions of any important terms.
- Literature Review/Related Information
This section provides a summary of research already conducted on the topic. Its purpose is to convey to a reader the historical context of the topic, any trends experienced by the topic, and how theory on the topic has informed practice of the topic (and vice versa). However, a literature review is more than just a annotated study-by-study summary. It is a well-organized, cohesive "essay" that flows smoothly in order to create a sound view of research and discover on the topic over time. In action research articles, this is also the section where you will likely find discussions of additional information gathering, or reconnaissance. Authors will provide dialogue about additional sources of information that helped to frame their action research study. They will focus on reflection on their own practice, description of the situation or problem, and explanation of why the problem has occurred and how the study will potentially address it.
- Methods
Arguably, this is the most crucial section in an empirical research article. This section allows the reader to essentially judge the quality of the research that was conducted. The methods section recounts the specific details of exactly how the study was conducted. Included in this section are subsections describing the participants in the study, the specific instruments used to collect data, the procedures used to collect data, and how the data were analyzed. You can learn a great deal about how to conduct sound research by studying methods sections of high quality research articles. At the same time, you should also be able to identify weaknesses of research studies by the details provided (or not provided) in methods sections of other articles.
- Results
Provided in the results section are the findings that have resulted from the analysis of collected data. In this section, authors may use tables or figures to support their discussions of analytical findings. Generally speaking, this section of reports resulting from qualitative studies tends to be quite lengthy, as it is filled with thick, narrative descriptions of the results from analyses of lots of qualitative data (from interviews, observations, field notes, document review, etc.). This section of reports from quantitative studies will typically be more brief (depending on the nature and number of research questions). If you feel intimidated by the use of statistical terminology, or by the use of statistical symbols and analytical results, try to focus your attention on the sentences provided in the article that describe those statistical findings (in words, not in numbers). This is essentially the authors’ interpretations of their statistical results. The information in the results sections should parallel the authors’ research questions and/or hypotheses.
- Conclusions and Recommendations
This section (also sometimes called the "Discussion" or "Implications" section) is where the authors summarize their results, draw salient conclusions, and tie this study back into the body of literature (that was reviewed earlier in the article). They also provide discussion of both practical and theoretical implications, as well as make recommendations for extending research and advancing knowledge on this particular topic. As you read this section, you want to be sure that the authors did not "go beyond" their data and results. In other words, the study’s conclusions should follow logically from its findings.
A final note...
As you read through a research article, you should constantly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the study and the resulting article. Focus your attention on following three aspects: (1) the methods used to conduct the study and report the results, (2) the overall impact of the article on the existing body of literature, and (3) the overall impact on educational practice. A good, sound research study and research article should accomplish all three of these aspects fairly—if not, very—well. You should be able to discuss what you see as strengths and weaknesses of a given article, and to be able to offer suggestions for ways to address the weaknesses in future research studies.
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