Reflexiones Sobre Investigacion Educacional (Reflections on Educational Research).

Educational research can serve to improve education in both developed and developing countries. It can be oriented toward increasing knowledge about the educational reality, generating theories, or confirming immediate educational political decisions. Educational research should be an interdisciplinary undertaking; this variety helps to unify various sciences and disciplines around specific problems. Educational research should be conducted in a systematic manner and with logical order, and with predetermined and controlled procedures and a critical sense in order to generate or improve the relevancy of hypotheses about presumed relationships between events and phenomenons of education as a social process, as an academic discipline, and as an integral system of a given society. Thus, educational research should be a scientific investigation. This paper discusses the relationship between theory, science, and research; proposes that it is possible to generate theory through educational research; discusses the dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative research; decribes the institutionalization of educational research and the building of an educational research policy; and discusses the personnel needed to conduct educational research and the role of international cooperation in educational research projects in Latin America. (NQA)