Quantitative Research Title about STEM strand
Answers
Explanation:
STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics… all of that.
The best topic - not just a good one but the best one - for students, who may not be experienced researchers? Actually that is not too difficult, because the best one is the one they can manage and with which they can do a good job.
The purpose of a research project is not to stun the world with the originality of the thinking or the paradigm-busting nature of the research. It is to allow a student to demonstrate that they know their subject, and can carry out an investigation as a ‘safe pair of hands’, respecting the academic forms of research in their field.
The best research project is one that allows a student to interrogate their topic deeply, extracting the maximum amount of meaning from their findings. It enables them to demonstrate their understanding of: ethics; validity; reliability; piloting; sampling knowledge; identifying of strengths and weaknesses in the research, including bias, controlling them; and generalisability.
Given the quantitative nature of much STEM work, I’m guessing that digging around the research literature will reveal some sources advocating small scale research, personal narratives, individual experience and so on. Qualitative work focuses on the quality of the experience, so it considers opinions, beliefs thoughts and feelings, attitudes, experiences, comparisons between one group of people and another - that sort of thing. There are particular research techniques to pull out this kind of information - questionnaire, interview, case study, Likert scale, thematic analysis, content analysis of one kind or another.
A common mistake for students is to focus on the big problem in their field, whatever that is, and understandably, to want to solve it. But the big problem is not going to be solved by a student project, it will be solved by an experienced research team, funded, and working over time. The student project needs to be small-scale, modest, and do-able. it is a learning experience, where a student learns to do research which they can then go on to do independently at a higher level.
For this reason it is better that a student does not design themselves a project that gets them bogged down in difficult material. They can, however, tackle one small aspect of it - that can be useful.
A good place to start is a case study, where we look at one context and interrogate it at depth, as far as we can. An early research project can be used to deepen existing knowledge, or to widen it; a student can research something familiar, or something new to them. If it is necessary, within the STEM paradigm, to argue for and demonstrate the value of qualitative research, that can be done too.