These focused questions are analogous to research questions asked in academic fields such as psychology, economics, and, unsurprisingly, education. An understanding of the definition of success allows the school to ask focused questions to help measure that success, which may be answered with the data.įor example, if a school is interested in increasing literacy, one focused question might ask: which groups of students are consistently scoring lower on standardized English tests? If a school is interested in promoting a strong climate of inclusiveness, a focused question may be: do teachers treat different types of students unequally? They need to first determine what their ultimate goal is and what achievement of that goal looks like. Schools interested in establishing a culture of data are advised to come up with a plan before going off to collect it. Such considerations are particularly important when the goals of the school aren’t put into terms that lend themselves to cut and dry analysis school goals often describe the improvement of abstract concepts like “school climate.” One of the biggest difficulties that comes with this integration is determining what data will provide an accurate reflection of those goals. Schools all over the country are beginning to develop a culture of data, which is the integration of data into the day-to-day operations of a school in order to achieve classroom, school, and district-wide goals. You want to measure students’ perception of their teacher using a survey but the teacher hands out the evaluations right after she reprimands her class, which she doesn’t normally do.Ĭontinue reading to find out the answer-and why it matters so much. You want to measure student intelligence so you ask students to do as many push-ups as they can every day for a week. So, there is high reliability but low validity.One of the following tests is reliable but not valid and the other is valid but not reliable. The experiment has been repeated with the same results. The measurement will be the same, allowing for a small margin of change for positioning of the tape measure). Then ask them what will happen if they repeat the measurement (and get them to do this). From this you can introduce the term validity – you are not measuring intelligence, you are measuring head size. Clearly this is not the case and discussions will ensue. Once they have made a note of this tell them that this is a measure of intelligence – the larger the head, the more intelligence. Instruct students to work in pairs and to measure the circumference of each other’s head.
#CONCEPTS OF VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY HOW TO#
Validity is whether you are measuringĪ good example of how to illustrate this in a lesson is using fabric tape measures (perhaps the ones you can find in that well-known Swedish furniture
ReliabilityĬan be thought of as repeatability – the extent to which, if you repeated the research, you would get the same results. Perhaps it did, but what is more likely is that it lacked one of these. That is, try to avoid, “the study lacked reliability and validity”. Many students get a little muddled initially by these two concepts and so it may be helpful, at first, to suggest that they avoid using them in the same Research Methods Validity and Reliability