Introduction to Research Methods in Education focuses on helping the reader develop a clear, logical, and conceptual understanding of the nature of empirical research in education, and of how those ideas lead to and underlie the principal research techniques. Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches are covered, along with practical guidance on issues such as how to prepare a research proposal, write a literature review, and analyze different types of data.
If you're doing education research and you haven't read this, where have you been? This book is brilliant, especially in its 2nd edition. It's in-depth, focused and brilliant for ethics, which is what I needed it for.
It's great for data collection methods too but I'm over word count already so I avoided that section. I've had it on reservation for AGES and just got it so you can see how good it is...