ABSTRACT
In the educational research literature broadly speaking, debates raged through the 1970s and 1980s over the relative credibility of quantitative and qualitative research (e.g., Firestone, 1987; Howe, 1985; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Smith, 1983; Smith & Heshusius, 1986). Over time, these debates have fostered productive discussion, for example, by challenging the dominance of a restricted set of inquiry frames, inviting a critical discourse about alternative modes of inquiry (Bereiter, 1994; Putney, Green, Dixon, & Kelly, 1999), and focusing attention on how research traditions delimit the knowledge that can be constructed (Behrens & Smith, 1996; Putney et al., 1999). However, it is becoming increasingly common for researchers to suggest that the quantitative-qualitative distinction is simplistic or simplynot helpful (Almasi, Martin Palmer, Gambrell, & Pressley, 1994; Lather, 1992; Pintrich, 2003; Salomon, 1991; Walker, 1992).
