Sample Research Proposals in Education

Educational research proposals are designed to stretch the thinking capabilities and awareness of students pursuing master's degrees in education. A research proposal should contribute new information to the current body of knowledge in any academic field. With the current national emphasis on educational quality and falling academic achievement levels, you can base a suitable research proposal on any existing educational problem and propose solutions for the problem.

The amount of parental involvement a student receives has been demonstrated to significantly affect that student's academic success. In some areas of the country and socioeconomic groups, parents are highly involved in their students' educational careers. In other geographic areas and population demographics, parents adopt the opinion that educating their children is the school's responsibility, not their own. This offers numerous options for building research proposals on investigating how to reverse the trend of parental nonparticipation and encourage increased parental involvement in children's primary and secondary education.

During the past 50 years, American educational theory has significantly changed regarding teaching reading skills. In the 1960s and '70s, phonics training was the gold standard and relied upon heavily to teach students reading skills. During the past three decades, many elementary school systems have adopted a whole language approach. You may choose to develop a research proposal investigating this policy change and evaluating the effectiveness of the new teaching paradigm.

An average classroom is filled with students who possess a wide spectrum of learning skills. A teacher's responsibility to educate each student can be significantly challenged by the presence of a few problematic children in the classroom. Problematic children are difficult to educate for a number of reasons, and an educational strategy that works for some will not work for others. For example, the cognitively impaired (CI) or emotionally impaired (EI) student requires a unique approach, which may be ineffective for a student who simply refuses to engage in a classroom. A valuable research proposal might investigate different categories of problematic children and suggest innovative educational strategies for meeting these students' individual educational needs.

Some families find that at a certain point in a child's educational career, they feel their student would benefit either from transitioning to traditional schooling from homeschooling or vice versa. You can uncover valuable research data by investigating how students make the transition between homeschooling and traditional schooling. The research will equip students, parents and professional educators with useful information when faced with helping students through these transitions.