Research critique (Criteria for the Evaluation of Educational Essay

Research critique (Criteria for the Evaluation of Educational Research) - Essay Example The term refers to the punishment of young children in this case and hence the title could have been a bit wordier without sounding verbose. In this section, I analyse the problem statement and definition of the issue that the article deals with. The problem statement can be expressed as follows: Though there have been studies’ detailing the effects of â€Å"time-out† as a punitive measure, there has been little focus on the perceptions of the children themselves on the measure as a tool to punish bad behaviour and inculcate good behaviour. The purpose of the article is to conduct a survey among the target population of children older than two or three years and study the children’s attitudes towards this form of punishment and whether it acts as a deterrent or do the children perceive it as just another punishment. As discussed in the section on literature review, the problem statement is consistent with the literature review. To take one instance, the article quotes studies by Betz (1994) about how the â€Å"time-out† does not teach desirable behaviour and the popularity of the technique as evidenced in the study by Webber and Scheuermann (1991). The other sources that the authors use to justify their focus on this specific problem statement are the ones by Dobson (1978) and Twiford (1984) who extol the virtues of â€Å"time-out†. The problem statement is not reformulated and the concluding remarks by the authors are about how further research needs to take place to validate their preliminary findings. Further, there is no discussion on limitations that the study has and though the scope is defined, it is more of a methodological approach to the problem statement by using surveys as a method of arriving at the results rather than a clear definition of what is in scope and what is out of scope. The point here is