Charting a clear course through the methodological jungle: Lessons about PAR from and for simulation-based educational research

Many argue that technology brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution offers new opportunities for student learning. In order for educators to use technology with wisdom, in-depth longitudinal research using rigorous methodological approaches is needed to understand the opportunities and challenges of including these technologies in management education. Therefore, educational researchers are challenged to design research projects to collect data from multiple sites over several years using various methodologies. This article examines strategies used by the researchers to design and implement a research project employing a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach that combined qualitative and quantitative data from two universities across several years. The research project was specifically designed to study learning using a business simulation. The article describes the research project including the various data collection points and analysis methods. The purpose of this article is to bridge the theory-implementation gap enabling educational researchers to consider the design of a comprehensive research project as well as identifying key challenges and practical suggestions for using PAR.