Research Approaches in Science and Engineering Education

Science education and engineering education as recently established fields employ the same approaches and methods in research. The main theme of these two fields, “education”, which deals with teaching and learning in science and engineering sciences, has led to many similarities in the research approaches of the two fields. Besides, the closeness of nature and scientific content of science and engineering science makes the two fields closer to each other regarding curriculum development, instruction and evaluation methods. All of these provide a lot of areas for researchers in these new fields. In this paper, first we examine general research methods in education and then we define, analyze and explain the strengths and weaknesses of the research methods employed in researches of these fields in higher education