For example, knowing both what students do when using computers, a qualitative measure, and how much time students spend using computers, a quantitative measure, provides a more complete understanding of student computer usage than either type of data individually. Since they are used in a variety of ways by different researchers, it's easy to get lost in the language. For simplicity, we'll take each of the steps one at a time, defining how we use the terms as we go, beginning on the next page with an explanation of goals. Goals First, review your goals. In the last section, you devised a list of goals and research questions.
Intermediate goals are the products or processes necessary to achieve outcomes.
The national technology goals, as follows, are good examples of intermediate goals. In many cases, in educational research, outcome goals are related broadly to improved teaching and learning. For example, one may want to know if access to word processing software will improve student writing. In this case, access to word processing software would be an intermediate goal and improvement in student writing would be an outcome goal. The relationship between intermediate goals and outcome goals is not always straightforward.