The most important concern when planning or carrying out pedagogical research is to do no harm to the student. Educators have a responsibility for the well-being of their students, and they abandon that responsibility whenever they do anything that they know will cause more harm than good. Educators can avoid this by examining the literature or asking colleagues whether a particular technique has been tried before, and if so, whether any harmful results were reported.
The primary goal of most pedagogical research must be to increase the efficacy of teaching methods. The parents, and perhaps the students themselves at the college level, pay for the education through either taxes or tuition, and the educator has a professional obligation to provide quality instruction. Research directly involving students of the researcher must clearly aim to be beneficial to the students, and not simply provide a pathway to publication for the researcher.
The student is dependent on the instructor for success in the classroom. The researching instructor must be careful that this dependency does not force the student into taking part in a study he otherwise would not participate in. The researcher should also take steps to avoid having this dependent nature influence the results of the research.
Potential ethical problems of the research model should be reviewed. For larger, more formal studies, especially at the university level, federal law requires an institutional review board to look at the study proposals to see whether any ethical issues arise. For informal studies in which the instructor is simply trying out a new teaching technique, an IRB is normally not necessary, but the instructor should still inform colleagues about the study so they can provide comments about potential problems.
Finally, the researcher must obtain the informed consent of the subject as well as the subject's parent if the subject is under 18 years of age. By doing so, the researcher demonstrates that he has respect for the student. Failure to obtain consent might make the instructor more liable to legal consequences.