Research in science education is to discover the truth which involves the combination of reasoning and experiences. In order to find out appropriate teaching methods that are necessary for teaching science students problem-solving skills, different research approaches are used by educational researchers based on the data collection and analysis…

A research paper by Card and Giuliano took advantage of a natural experiment in a large school district to explore the impact that universal screening policies had on the identification of historically underrepresented minorities in gifted and talented programs. The authors concluded that the universal screening system was more effective than the…

Card and Giuliano conducted a regression discontinuity study in a large Florida school district to investigate the magnitude of academic benefits of the district's gifted program. They found that for children identified as gifted through an intelligence test, the program provided few or no benefits. But children who were admitted to the gifted…

One of the central assumptions of the causal-indicator literature is that all causal indicators must be included in the research model and that the exclusion of one or more relevant causal indicators would have severe negative consequences by altering the meaning of the latent variable. In this research we show that the omission of a relevant…

In most qualitative research studies involving the creation of interview transcriptions, researchers seldom demonstrate much reflexivity about the transcription process, rarely making mention of transcription processes as part of their reporting of data collection and analysis procedures beyond a simple statement that audio- or videotaped data…

Drawing on the recent critiques of the global knowledge economy of social science research, this article explores possible ways in which the Japanese education research communities can reposition themselves in the wider international education research community. The premises of this discussion are that there exists a global structure of academic…

This study aims to investigate the effect of methods to deal with missing data on item difficulty estimations under different test length conditions and sampling sizes. In this line, a data set including 10, 20 and 40 items with 100 and 5000 sampling size was prepared. Deletion process was applied at the rates of 5%, 10% and 20% under conditions…

The overwhelming majority of current faculty retirement research focuses on how institutions manage the economic implications of retirement, particularly retirement benefits and the financial costs to the institution. There has been little scholarship to date exploring the topic of retirement from the individual retiree's perspective. Recently…

The goal of this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to one of the most rigorous nonexperimental analytical methods currently employed by education researchers: regression discontinuity.

Currently, the issue of inequality is one of the most pressing concerns in education and educational research. Factors such as increased socio-economic inequality, movement of people across national boundaries and refugees create major challenges for local communities and schools. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that teaching and leadership are…

The push for evidence-based practice in education has led to a range of initiatives aimed at bridging the gap between research, policy and practice. Among these are the establishment of brokerage agencies with a mission to synthesise the findings of educational research. This development has been the subject of extensive controversy over the last…

This case study provides an account of my experiences and lessons learned in designing and implementing a survey research. The research was part of my doctoral thesis in educational measurement and quantitative methods. The purpose of the study was to examine the effectiveness of a Completely Structured Training compared with Partially Structured…

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to provide empirical evidence about the reporting of methodology to address missing outcome data and the acknowledgement of their impact in Cochrane systematic reviews in the mental health field. Methods: Systematic reviews published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews after January 1, 2009 by…

Recently, Stephen Gorard has outlined strong objections to the use of significance testing in social research. He has argued, first, that as the samples used in social research are almost always non-random it is not possible to use inferential statistical techniques and, second, that even if a truly random sample were achieved, the logic behind…

The effective evaluation of correctional programs is critically important. However, research in corrections rarely allows for the randomization of offenders to conditions of the study. This limitation compromises internal validity, and thus, causal conclusions can rarely be drawn. Increasingly, researchers are employing propensity score matching…