From Methodological Review to Research Design: Decisions Adopted in an Educational Robotics Study for Physics Teaching in a Rural Context

Abstract

Methodological decisions in educational research should not be presented as isolated elements or as a list taken from research-methods textbooks. This article reconstructs the process through which a methodological review of educational robotics studies informed the methodology of a doctoral investigation conducted with upper-secondary students at a rural school in Apartadó, Colombia. The final version of the dissertation was treated as the main source, and the documentary corpus used during its development was examined. The original Scopus search retrieved 184 records published between 2018 and 2023, from which 50 documents were selected according to relevance and citation count and then the search is broadened, selecting 21 articles published between 2024 and 2026. A broader group of later studies and specific literature on the CLASS and PMQ/SMQ-II instruments were also available for comparison. The analysis showed a wide variety of approaches in educational robotics, limited use of pretest-posttest studies with a control group, frequent reliance on questionnaires, interviews, and observations, and the need to distinguish academic performance from attitudes and motivation. These findings were considered together with the research question, the characteristics of intact school groups, the institutional conditions, and the availability of measurement instruments. As a result, the study adopted a positivist paradigm, a quantitative method, a quasi-experimental design with experimental and control groups, a correlational component, and an analysis plan suited to the nature of the data. The article argues that a methodological review can be used to justify the connected decisions that make up a study rather than merely to summarize previous research.