Pesquisa em educação: desafios contemporâneos

Abstract

The paper aims at discussing epistemological and methodological issues in educational research. First, it describes historical path of Brazilian educational research and shows that a growth in the number of studies in the last 20 years brought out a great change in topics, methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and contexts. Next, it points out the main problems that have been raised concerning quality of research, such as the nature of produced knowledge, the criteria for research evaluation and the underlined assumptions of quantitative and qualitative methodologies.