Golden West Colleges

Alaminos City

Preliminary Grading
First Semester, AY 2023-2024

Research 1/ELT 9
The Nature of Inquiry
1. When do you make inquiry? How should you make inquiry?
2. Why is inquiry a problem-solving method? How does it make you like a
scientist?
3. How does inquiry elevate your thinking power?
4. Of what benefit is cooperative learning in inquiry?
5. What are the hindrances to scientific inquiry? Explain each briefly.
Research
6. Explain research.
7. How are research and inquiry related?
8. Why is research important?
9. Describe the scientific method. Give the steps of the Scientific Method.
10. Explain hypothesis.
11. Why should research findings be made public?
12. Conduct an experiment using the given data:

Due: August 22, 2023

=Dr. Gloria N. Reinoso

 Golden West Colleges
Alaminos City

Preliminary Grading
First Semester, AY 2021-2022

Research
The Nature of Inquiry and Research

Inquiry is a learning process that motivates you to obtain knowledge or information about people,
things, places or events. You do this by investigating or asking questions about something you are inquisitive
about. It requires you to collect data, meaning, facts and information about the object of your inquiry and
examine such data carefully. Inquiry is an active learning process
Putting you in a situation where you need to probe, investigate, or ask questions to find answers or
solutions to what you are worried or doubtful about, inquiry is a problem- solving technique. Solving a problem
by being inquisitive, you tend to act like scientists who are inclined to think logically or systematically in
seeking evidence to support their conclusions about something. Beginning with whatever experience or
background knowledge you have, you proceed like scientists with your inquiry by imagining, speculating,
interpreting, criticizing, and creating something out of what you discovered.
Inquiry elevates your thinking power. It makes you think in different ways, enabling you to arrive at a
particular idea or understanding that will motivate you to create something unique, new, or innovative for your
personal growth as well as for the world. Inquisitive thinking allows you to shift from one level of thought to
another. It does not go in a linear fashion; rather, it operates in an interactive manner.
Solving problem, especially social issues, does not only involve yourself but other members of the
society too. Hence, inquiry, as a problem-solving technique, includes cooperative learning because any
knowledge from members of the society can help to make the solution. Whatever knowledge you have about
your world bears the influence of your cultural, sociological, institutional, or ideological understanding of the
world.

The following as some of the hindrances to scientific inquiry. They are mostly errors in personal judgment. The
explanations are made for local adaptation.

1. Tradition. This is accepting that customs, beliefs, practices, and superstitions are true and are parts of
the daily lives of men. No effort is exerted to find out whether they are true or not. For example, there is
a traditional belief among some women that women who are conceiving should avoid eating dark or
black food such as black berries because their children will become dark also. This may be true or not,
but many women believe and practice it without verifying its truth. People have the idea that when
everybody does thing, it is true. This belief is a hindrance to scientific investigation.
2. Authority. This is accepting without question, an option about a certain subject which is given by
someone who is considered an authority on the subject. If an ordinary person says that kissing transmits
colds, he is not believed much, he may even be laughed at. On the other hand, when a doctor says the
same thing, he is believed without question. Suppose, a doctor commits a mistake and it is a fact that
some doctors commit mistakes sometimes. Worse, sometimes persons with big names in the community
make pronouncements about things outside their own expertise and they are believed because of their
names. They are believed without any scientific inquiry about the truth of their pronouncements.
3. Inaccurate observation. This is describing wrongly what is actually observed. For instances, in the
dead of a moonlit night, a man sees a shadow in the form of a person and the man concludes at once
without any investigation that he has seen a ghost. When a meteor streaks the atmosphere people who
see it say they have seen a flying saucer. When one sees a man lying unconscious in the street after he is
hit by a speeding car, he concludes at once that the person is already dead even if he is not. He does not
investigate anymore.
 4. Selective observation. This is persisting to believe an observed pattern from an overgeneralization and
ignoring other pertinent patterns. For example, one sees for the first time one or two prosperous Chinese
store beside a poor, struggling Filipino store. He forms a conclusion that the Chinese are more shrewd
and more competitive than Filipinos. So whenever he sees Chinese and Filipino stores he always has
that idea that Chinese are better businessmen than Filipinos ignoring that there are also poor Chinese
businessmen and there are also very good and more competitive Filipino businessmen.
5. Illogical reasoning. This is attributing something to another without any logical basis. For instance,
because of the extended good weather it may rain at the weekend. Or, because it is sunny it will not rain
that day. Or, when a woman is believed to be a sorcerer. These are beliefs without any logical basis and
no effort is exerted to verify them.
6. Mystification. This is attributing to supernatural power, the phenomena that cannot be understood. This
is accepting that there are things which are beyond human intelligence to understand and which are
reserved only to a supernatural being. Thus, no effort is exerted to make a scientific inquiry about these
phenomena.
7. To err is human. This is an attitude that admits the fallibility of man. When a man renders a wrong
decision or commits a mistake, he merely leans on the saying “To err is human.” He does not make any
effort anymore to study why he committed the error, how he committed the error, the implications of
his error, how he can correct and how to make more sound decisions in the future.
8. Dogmatism. This is an addition. This is an unwritten policy of certain institutions and governments
prohibiting the study of topics that are believed to run counter to the established doctrines of such
institutions of governments. Thus in communistic states, it is unlikely that one studies and writes about
the beauty of democracy. The same is true in a democracy. There is veiled prohibition to study and
write about the beauty and adoption of communism. It may be a remote possibility that a research
student in a Christian church-related school can make a study about non-existence of God. It is unlikely
also that one advocates the adoption of polygamy in a Christian community because his study findings
say that polygamy is good.

RESEARCH
Research is a process of executing various mental acts for discovering and examining facts and information to
prove the accuracy or truthfulness of your claims or conclusion about the topic of your research. Research
requires you to inquire or investigate about your chosen research topic by asking questions that will make you
engage yourself in top-level thinking strategies of interpreting, analyzing, criticizing, appreciating or creating to
enable you to discover truths about many things that you tend to wonder about the topic of your research work.
Research is analogous to inquiry, in that, both involve investigation of something through questioning.
However research is more complicated than inquiry because it does not center mainly on raising questions about
the topic but also on carrying out a particular order of research stages. Each stage of the research is not an
individual task because the knowledge you obtain through each stage comes not only from yourself other people
as well. Thus, similar to inquiry, research involves cooperative learning.
Why Research is of Value

How can educators, parents, and students obtain the information they need? Many ways of obtaining
information, of course, exist. One can consult experts, review books and articles, question or observe colleagues
with relevant experience, examine one’s own past experience, or even rely on intuition. All these approaches
suggest possible ways to proceed, but the answer they provide are not always reliable. Experts may be
mistaken; source documents may contain no insights of value; colleagues may have no experience in the matter;
and one’s own experience or intuition may be irrelevant or misunderstood.
This is why a knowledge of scientific research methodology can be of value. The scientific method
provides us with another way of obtaining information—information that is as accurate and reliable as we can
get. Let us compare it, therefore, with some of the other ways of knowing.
Research is simply a systematic and refined technique of thinking, employing specialized tools,
instruments and procedures in order to obtain a more adequate solution of a problem than would be possible
under ordinary means. It starts with a problem, collects data or facts, analyze these critically, and reaches
decisions based on actual evidence. It involves original work instead of a mere exercise of personal opinion. It
evolves from a genuine desire to know rather than a desire to prove something, seeking to know not only what
but how much, and measurement is therefore a central feature of it.
From the foregoing discussion characteristics of a good research can be summarized as follows:

Characteristics of Research

1. Accuracy. It must give correct or accurate data, which the footnotes, notes, and biographical entries
should honestly and appropriately documented or acknowledged.
2. Objectiveness. It must deal with facts, not with mere opinions arising from assumptions, generalizations,
prediction, or conclusions.
3. Timeliness. It must work on a topic that is fresh, new, and interesting to the present society.
4. Relevance. Its topic must be instrumental in improving society or in solving problems affecting the lives
of people in a community.
5. Clarity. It must succeed in expressing its central point or discoveries by using simple, direct, concise,
and correct language.
6. Systematic. It must take place ion an organized or orderly manner.
7. Empirical. Its procedure, data gathered and research is generally accepted.

Purposes of Research

1. To discover facts about known phenomena. (Alcohol is a known phenomenon and research may turn it
into a kind of fuel equal in quality to gasoline)
2. To find answers to problems which are only partially solved by existing methods and information.
(Cancer is a serious disease which is only partially cured by present methods but due to intensive and
continuous research, the disease may be eradicated later on)
3. To discover previously unrecognized substances or elements. Previously had 92 elements but due to
research we now have more than 100)
4. To order related, valid generalizations into systematized science. (The result of this purpose of research
is the science we are now studying in school)
5. To provide basis for decision-making in business, industry, education, government, and in other
undertakings.
6. To satisfy the researcher’s curiosity. (Edison was curious about how a hen hatches her eggs and made a
research on that and he invented the incubator)
7. To find answers to queries by means of scientific methods. One important question that may be asked
which can be answered only by means of research is: In what setting is life expectancy higher in the city
or in the barrio?
The Scientific Method
When many people hear the word science, they think of things like white laboratory coats, laboratories,
test tubes, or space exploration. Scientists are people who know a lot, and the term science suggests a
tremendous body of knowledge. What we are interested in here, however, is science as a method of
knowing. It is the scientific method that is important to researchers.
What is this method? Essentially it involves testing ideas in the public arena. Almost all of us humans
are capable of making connections of seeing relationships and associations among the sensory information
we experience. Most of us then identify these connections as “facts” items of knowledge
about the world in which we live. We may speculate, for example, that our students may be less attentive in
class when we lecture than when we engage them in discussion. A physician may guess that people who
sleep between six and eight hours each night will be less anxious than those who sleep more than or less
than they used to because they spend most of their free time watching television. But in each of these cases,
we do not really know if our belief is true. What we are dealing with are only guesses or hunches, or as
scientists would say, hypotheses.
Such investigations, however, do not constitute science unless they are made public. This means that all
aspects of the investigation are described in sufficient detail so that the study can be repeated by anyone
who questions the results-provided of course, that those interested possess the necessary competence and
resources. Private procedures, speculations, and conclusions are not scientific until they are made public.
 Hypothesis- In many studies, there are several possible explanation for a problem or phenomenon.
These are called hypotheses and may occur at any stage of an investigation. Some researcher state a
hypothesis (e.g., “Students are less attentive during lectures than during discussion”) right at the beginning
of a study. In other cases, hypotheses emerge as a study progresses, sometimes even when the
information that has been collected is being analyzed and interpreted. The scientist might find that instances
of sacrifice seemed to be more common after such societies made contact with other cultures, suggesting a
hypothesis such as: “Sacrifice is more likely when traditional practices are threatened.”

Steps of the Scientific Method

1. Identifying the Problem. There is a problem of some sort – some disturbance in our lives that disrupts the
normal or desirable state of affairs. Something is bothering us. For most of us who are not scientists, it may
be a tension of some sort, a disruption in our normal routine. Examples would be if we have difficulty
making friends. To the professional scientist, it may be an unexplained discrepancy in one’s field of
knowledge, a gap to be closed.
2. Formulating Hypothesis. Steps are taken to define more precisely the problem or the questions to be
answered, to become clearer about exactly what the purpose of the study is. For example, we must think
through what we mean by student attentiveness and why we consider it insufficient; the scientist must
clarify what is meant by human sacrifice (e.g., how does it differ from murder?).

3. Conducting Investigation. We attempt to determine what kinds of information would solve the problem.
Generally speaking, there are two possibilities: study what is already known or carry out a piece of research.
As you will see, the first is prerequisite for the second; the second is a major focus of this course, in
preparation, we must be familiar with a wide range of possibilities for obtaining information, so as to get
first hand information on the problem. For example, the teacher might consider giving a questionnaire to
students or having someone observe during class. The scientist might decide to examine historical accounts
or spend time in societies where the practice of human sacrifice exist (or has until recently). Spelling out the
details of information gathering is a major aspect of planning a research study.
4. Organizing and analyzing data. We must decide, as far as it is possible, how we will organize the
information that we obtain. It is not uncommon, in both daily life and research, to discover that we cannot
make sense of all the information we possess (sometimes referred to as information overload). Anyone
attempting to understand another society while living in it has probably experienced this phenomenon. Our
scientist will surely encounter this problem, but so will our teacher unless she has figured out how to handle
the questionnaire and/or observational information that is obtained.
5. Forming Conclusion. After the information has been collected and analyzed, it must be interpreted. While
his step may seem straightforward at first, this is seldom the case. As you will see, one of the most
important parts of research is to avoid kidding ourselves. The teacher may conclude that her students are
inattentive because they dislike lectures, but she may be misinterpreting the information. The scientist may
conclude that human sacrifice is or was a means of trying to control nature, but this also may be incorrect.