ABSTRACT
The Learning School project now has at its disposal a number of tools which have been tried, tested, modified and re-tried for the purpose of gathering the rich and informative data upon which the findings of its research are founded. Broadly speaking, the kit contains two types of tool: those which are more often used to find out how much or to what extent something happens, and those which are used to try to understand how something happens. More technically, these two types of instrument can be thought of as quantitative and qualitative respectfully. The Learning School students, coming fresh to research, were not on familiar terms with the great dilemmas of educational research, with the ontological and epistemological questions which academics worry over, but that is not to say that successive groups ignored such issues. Lots of time went into discussions of the appropriateness of certain tools for different purposes, gathering information about certain events or phenomena, and what the nature of those might be in the first place.
