Week 8: Post 3

I think that the most interesting part of the chapter besides the different research methodologies is the systematic ways of knowing. There is so much information that comes through research and these researchers need to make the decision of what is good data and what is bad data. I think the most interesting part of this section is when the book states that “researchers often set out to challenge a set of commonsense beliefs;” they are challenging old beliefs and creating new ones. One of the most important things to a researcher would be the research itself and for research to be useful it should have six basic characteristics. These characteristics are: is it question oriented, methodological, replicable, self-critical, cumulative and self-correcting, and cyclical. If the research does not incorporated these characteristics I suppose it is worth using for purposes other than learning purposes. This made me think of science classes and the research and experiments that we would conduct for the class. We were made to do lab write ups and I can remember that each experiment that we did all had the above criteria.