Rigorous evidence of program effectiveness has become increasingly important with the 2015 passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). One question that has not yet been fully explored is whether program evaluations carried out or commissioned by developers produce larger effect sizes than evaluations conducted by independent third parties.…

Introduction: For some time now the field of medical education has been criticized by many of its stakeholders. Countless debates have been presented in the literature regarding the quality of medical education research, adequacy of methodological rigor, and other concerns. Methods: At present, the views expressed have largely come from physicians…

While literature on research methods abounds, little attention has been given to understanding how qualitative researchers and their approaches to research (i.e., the researcher's stance) shape what we know about global service-learning (GSL) and how we come to know what we know about GSL. Researchers often uncritically adopt a particular research…

This article reflects on a university human research ethics committee's unease regarding a feminist visual pilot study within the field of education. The small exploratory study proposed to explore a migrant mother's production of her son's identity through her family photograph collection. The committee requested substantial…

In this review, we lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary conversation between literacy education research and relevant neuroscience research. We review recent neuroscience research on correlates of proposed cognitive subprocesses in text decoding and reading comprehension and analyze some of the methodological and conceptual challenges of…

Two related themes currently dominate discourse on open-access colleges, particularly community colleges: increasing college-going and degree attainment and improving the performance of postsecondary institutions with respect to producing graduates. Largely missing from this discourse, however, is cogency concerning the innumerable ways in which…

In many academic areas, students' success depends upon their ability to envision and manipulate complex multidimensional information spaces. Fields in which students struggle with mastering these types of representations include (but are by no means limited to) mathematics, science, medicine, and engineering. There has been some educational…

Most, though not all, qualitative research is naturalistic in that the researcher enters the world of the participants as it exists and obtains data without any deliberate intervention to alter the setting. The resulting accounts of what people say and do form the basis for inductive rather than deductive analysis--theory is created to explain the…

Examines characteristics of educational knowledge produced by educational researchers and considers how this impacts on educational research. Reviews the negative and positive consequences of this structurally egalitarian and substantively divergent knowledge production in education schools. (MMU)

Kaplan (1964) describes the now classic distinction between "logic-in-use," the more or less logical cognitive style and procedures used by the educational scientist, and "reconstructed logic," the scientist's after-the-fact, explicit formulation and idealization of the logic and procedures. However, most technical documents…

Transformation of education into an evidence-based field is a task that will require involvement of federal and state policymakers, local education leaders, administrators, teachers, and parents. Over the past 6 years, a new direction has been set for education research. This report presents the National Board for Education Sciences' evaluation of…

Educational researchers in the United States contend that making low-performing students repeat a grade is an ineffective educational practice. This view derives largely from the summary of grade retention research reported by Holmes (1989). A meta-analysis of more recent studies (Jimerson, 2001) also concludes that the practice of grade retention…

Prepared for discussion at an Adult Education Research Conference, this paper offers commentary and summative evaluation of eleven doctoral dissertations on the process of determining educational or training needs of specific adult populations. As context for discussion Joe Ellis' definitions of needs--Felt, Real, and Education--are noted along…

This book of collected papers and essays addresses issues of research in multicultural education and aims to facilitate production of this research and to meet the needs of researchers in this area. Part 1, "The Marginalization of Multicultural Discourse," contains three papers on the barriers, needs, and limitations inherent in doing…

This paper presents an analysis of research on women in educational administration, identifying the issues which have been treated, examining the methodological perspectives of the research, determining the quality of the research, and formulating a paradigm for future research on women in education. One hundred fourteen doctoral dissertations on…