• Learn how to design a research project
• Understand different types of research.
• Explore, in-depth, a subject of your personal interest.
• Critique research done by academics, think tanks, professors, and others.
• Broaden your understanding of and evaluate claims in newspapers and other news media.
• Enhance your knowledge and use of logic.
• Conduct a literature review founded on research-based sources.
• Write a social science research paper.
• Know when to use certain basic statistics.

Dr. Ray has taught students at all levels - elementary school, junior high school, high school, and undergraduate and graduate university - over the course of many years. He has taught private school, public school, and homeschool students. Dr. Ray is an energetic and engaging teacher and has received much praise for his teaching and speaking abilities. He serves as the president of the National Home Education Research Institute and is internationally known for his homeschool research, service as an expert witness in court cases and before legislatures, and speaking at educational conferences, including those for home educators. Dr. Ray and his wife have eight children and live on a small farm in western Oregon.

Students will receive careful and detailed review, critique, feedback, and grading from Dr. Ray on three written assignments. Students will also take one exam to show their understanding of basic research methods terms and concepts. Students who successfully complete the course receive a certificate of completion for this one-semester, research methods and writing, high school course.

Students who complete this course and are interested in completing the research project they design might be able to continue in a mentored project with Dr. Ray to execute their study.

Tuition is $795 and is due in full upon registration. Class size is limited - so students receive plenty of personal attention and feedback from Dr. Ray - so first come, first served. Late enrollments may be accepted on a case-by-case basis.

The registration form explains details such as the beginning lecture date, possible payment arrangements, the tuition refund policy, forms of payment, the textbook to be used and its cost, and more.

Please call Dr. Ray's office at 503-364-1490 or email Abbie at mail@nheri.org for a registration form or if you have any questions. Remember, space is limited.

Now, back to a little more fun about research and statistics.

• Statistics can be made to prove anything - even the truth. ~Author Unknown

• Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.  ~Author Unknown

• While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.  You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant.  So says the statistician.  ~Arthur Conan Doyle

• I could prove God statistically.  Take the human body alone - the chances that all the functions of an individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity. ~George Gallup [Note 1]

• There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.  ~Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883

• Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.  ~Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

• A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes.  It is innocent, unless found guilty.  A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe.  It is guilty, until found effective.  ~Edward Teller