Educational research is a systematic approach to various aspects of teaching, learning, training, and education. The purpose of these studies is to discover patterns of educational practice, to innovate and improve theories to explain these patterns, and to apply research-based knowledge to create and validate methods for improving educational activities. These studies always face very important philosophical questions about the nature of the realities of human life and to achieve the best tools for acquiring knowledge in these matters. Scientists, from the distant past to the present, have assigned different positions to themselves in each of the above cases and have made different approaches to studying the realities of human life and to the problems of education and training their profession.
Two common approaches in educational research, namely quantitative approaches and qualitative approaches, are among the most important research methods in the human sciences. Since educational research is a purely human process, it is deeply subject to the worldview and philosophy held by the researcher, and the possibility of bias and error abounds. A careful awareness of these sources of bias, a clear statement of the worldview and philosophy underlying the understanding and perceptions of the humanities and of education, and adherence to recognized research standards are effective aids in preventing the errors in question. In both cases, the educational researcher is faced with the systematic collection and proper analysis of the collected information in order to provide generalizable descriptions, predictions, interventions, and correct explanations of various educational science problems.
In other divisions, research is categorized into descriptive, correlational, and empirical and their branches. Descriptive research generally focuses on precise and detailed observations and measurements of educational phenomena. Correlational and causal-comparative or predictive research seeks to collect information at a specific point in time to predict future behaviors and events. And experimental research seeks to see if it is possible to control and improve a specific phenomenon by intervening in its state. On the other hand, some research also seeks to present new theories to explain some phenomena that are the subject of study in the humanities.
In this seventh issue of the "Scientific-Research Quarterly of Educational Innovations", six articles have been published, some of which are quantitative research and some of which are qualitative research. Also, some of the articles are descriptive research, some are correlational and predictive research, and some are research that has theorized and produced knowledge collection tools as the basis of its work.
The first article of this issue of the quarterly journal, entitled "The Relationship between Creativity and Personality Characteristics of Tehran High School Students," is a quantitative and correlational research. In this study, the relationship between the level of creativity and the five major personality factors (neuroticism, extraversion, flexibility, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) was measured in a sample group of 250 third-year high school students and pre-university students, and the relationship between them was examined. The results of this study showed that adolescent male students are superior to girls in terms of creativity, the tendency to neuroticism is more prevalent among girls than boys, and there is a positive relationship between the three personality factors of extraversion, conscientiousness, and flexibility with creativity.
The second article, titled "Theorizing and Scaling for Measuring Value Systems in Order to Investigate the Impact of Globalization on the Value Systems of Iranian Adolescent Students," is published in two parts (one as the second article and the other as an appendix to the article in the final section of this issue, and titled "The Lotfabadi-Norouzi Scale Questionnaire for Measuring Value Systems," and is of the type of theorizing and scaling. To theorize about the value system, relying on classical Islamic and Iranian philosophy, the principles of social psychology and educational psychology have been used. The theory presented in this article is profoundly different from Western theories about the value system, which were most prominently proposed by Max Weber, Edward Spranger, and Gordon Allport, and scales have been developed based on it. The theory presented in this article divides the main foundations of the value system of national culture into three sets, each set having two polar opposites. and a wide range of intermediate states. These three sets include sacred beliefs versus egotism and worldliness, piety and honesty versus personal gain, and rationality and wisdom versus superficiality. The value system measurement scale derived from this theory was developed in the form of questionnaires containing 90+45 questions to measure ten basic categories in a person's value system in various areas: individual, family, economic, political, social, artistic, scientific and theoretical, religious, national, and global, and was administered to a pilot sample of 568 high school and pre-university students. In this scale, in addition to its content validity and construct validity, which have been provided through theoretical and specialized studies, its validity has also been confirmed through factor analysis studies on the results obtained.
The third article, "Explanation and Analysis of the Process of Islamization of Sciences and Its Effects on Education and Training", is a qualitative research to describe and explain the process of Islamization of the humanities, especially educational sciences. In this article, four approaches (inferential, traditionalist, paradigm shift, and presupposition shift) that have been used to Islamize the humanities, as well as the implications of each of these approaches in education and training in four critical, epistemological, theological, and educational fields, are discussed. This article emphasizes that from the beginning of Muslim thinkers' encounter with modern Western thought, despite their differences, they have agreed on one point. That point is that all Muslim thinkers, on the one hand, feel the need to change the existing frameworks, and on the other hand, they are committed to preserving their beliefs. Alongside this duality, a situation has sometimes arisen that has led to the emergence of incompatible ideas. For example, on the one hand, it has been emphasized that the Islamic education system should be consistent with some global standards, and on the other hand, when some of these standards enter the field of local education, it causes inconsistency and incoherence. At the same time, what is observed today in the contemporary world and consequently in education systems is the lack of real spirituality, which has led to the emergence of numerous social crises. Islamizing science and education can be a fundamental solution to this problem. The fourth article, titled "Investigating the Role of Self-Regulatory Strategies in Solving Students' Mathematical Problems," is a qualitative research that has studied in depth a purposive sample of 36 fourth-grade primary school boys and girls in two schools. In this study, how to perform mathematical tasks, observing students' performance while solving mathematical problems to learn about their self-regulatory strategies, and semi-structured interviews with students after performing mathematical tasks to learn about their evaluation of self-regulatory strategies have been investigated. Qualitative analysis of the research data indicates that students are divided into three groups: "self-regulating", "semi-self-regulating", and "non-self-regulating" in terms of their ability to use cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies in solving common and unusual mathematical problems. Also, the main difference between students in the first group and the other two groups is their ability to recognize and pay attention to all problem conditions. The strategies used by students in the first group also have a significant variety and they have a more realistic evaluation of their performance. This research clearly shows that the performance of the three groups of students in solving unusual problems indicates a significant difference in their awareness of the whys and hows of self-regulatory strategies in solving problems.
The fifth article, "The Necessity of Developing a Curriculum Theory for Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran", is a descriptive research type that, after explaining curriculum theories from philosophical, psychological, and sociological perspectives common in the West and stating the elements and classifications that exist in this case, proposes the necessity of developing a curriculum theory based on the Islamic worldview and Muslim education literature. The conclusion of the article from the topics discussed is that in our country, efforts to explain the theory of the curriculum and achieve a native curriculum perspective are absolutely necessary as a guide for the practice of planners, authors, and teachers of the country, because the lack of a native curriculum theory in our education system causes inconsistencies between various curricula, especially during practice. The sixth article, titled "Content Analysis of the Book of the Gifts of Heaven and the Workbook (published in 2002-2003) in Comparison with the Content of the Religious Education Book (published in 2001), the Second Year of Elementary School, Based on William Rumi's Content Analysis Model," is a descriptive type based on content analysis research. In this research, the content of the old religious education book and the two new books, Gifts of Heaven and the Workbook, has been analyzed in terms of text, questions, and images. In each case, each of the content components was divided into sentence, question, and image categories and then analyzed using these categories. The purpose of using this method in content analysis was to determine to what extent the aforementioned categories can attract the learner to learn the text, questions, and images, and to what extent the students' engagement coefficient with the three categories is. The research findings in this article indicate that two new books developed for teaching religious education in the second grade of elementary school have caused more students to engage with the content and, compared to the old religious education book for the second grade of elementary school, have greater value.