Education research looks into the needs, causes, structures, and outcomes of teaching and learning, with a rigorous commitment to research design and interpretation, validity, and reliability (see resources below).
The field is comprised of a broad scope of scholarship that examines the learning processes within education. More specifically, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) defines education research as “the scientific field of study that examines education and learning processes and the human attributes, interactions, organizations, and institutions that shape educational outcomes. Scholarship in the field seeks to describe, understand, and explain how learning takes place throughout a person’s life and how formal and informal contexts of education affect all forms of learning. Education research embraces the full spectrum of rigorous methods appropriate to the questions being asked and also drives the development of new tools and methods” (www.AERA.net/Education-Research).