In a recent "Journal of Marriage and Family" article, Johnson and Easterling (2012) reviewed research on the effects of parental incarceration on child well-being, focusing on the various conceptual frameworks linking parental incarceration and child well-being and the "important methodological and conceptual challenges related to selection bias"…

Background: Our ability to look at structure and function of a living brain has increased exponentially since the early 1970s. Many studies of developmental disorders now routinely include a brain imaging or electrophysiological component. Amid current enthusiasm for applications of neuroscience to educational interventions, we need to pause to…

This article concludes the special issue of "Studies in Educational Evaluation" concerned with "Evaluating learning pattern development in higher education" by discussing research issues that have emerged from the previous contributions. The article considers in turn: stability versus variability in learning patterns; old versus new analytic…

In Turkey and many other countries, the importance of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) is increasing, and as a result, projects and studies are being conducted regarding the use of the IWB in classrooms. Accordingly, in these countries, many issues are being researched, such as the IWB's contribution to the education process, its use in classroom…

Engagement is one of the most widely misused and overgeneralized constructs found in the educational, learning, instructional, and psychological sciences. The articles in this special issue represent a wide range of traditions and highlight several key conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and analytical issues related to defining and measuring…

Background: The efficacy of three dietary treatments for ADHD has been repeatedly tested in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). These interventions are restricted elimination diets (RED), artificial food colour elimination (AFCE) and supplementation with free fatty acids (SFFA). There have been three systematic reviews and associated…

In 2012, I began a life history research dissertation examining the lives of three Black art teachers in order to understand how they conceptualize and reconcile their social and professional identities as Black/artist/teacher. As a constructivist researcher, my goal was to understand the multiple social constructions of meaning of this group,…

That the present day society profits from research in many areas is evident. This has stimulated a keen desire to emulate similarly advantageous contributions in other areas. It appears to imply not only a need to know how to (better) support action in general or any action, but also how to support the act of making "better" itself (better…

Crude and dangerous ideas about the genetic heritability of intelligence, and a supposed biological basis for the Black/White achievement gap, are alive and well inside the education policy process but taking new and more subtle forms. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the paper analyses recent hereditarian writing, in the UK and the USA, and…

This chapter is a call for consequential education research that has transformative potential: intellectually, educationally, and socially. It is about learning to see differently. It is an argument about seeing our work with youth and communities in ways that can help education researchers see ingenuity instead of ineptness and inability, to see…

This paper presents a case study on the transfer of research into policy and describes how evidence was used to inform, develop, frame and ultimately agree a national strategy for research and data on children's lives in Ireland. The paper highlights key issues arising in the research-policy exchange, but also argues that evidence on its own,…

Studies of the effects of class attendance on class performance typically are quasi-experimental because students choose whether or not to attend class; that is, the samples are self-selecting. The lack of random assignment prevents one from establishing a causal relationship between attendance and performance. Relating attendance to performance…

Bullying in schools is a significant and continuing issue in education. This is despite widespread attention within the professional education community and beyond, into the wider public arena. In this paper, we review the existing literature on bullying in schools, with a particular focus on the Australian secondary school context, to develop a…

With the increase in frequency of the use of mixed methods, both in research publications and in externally funded grants there are increasing calls for a set of standards to assess the quality of mixed methods research. The purpose of this mixed methods study was to conduct a multi-phase analysis to create a preliminary rubric to evaluate mixed…

This article provides an examination of a range of mixed methods research projects that employ Internet-mediated technologies (IMT) for data collection. Using a case study approach, this article allows for the uncovering of a process by which IMT are used as a data collection medium in mixed methods praxis. Under the theoretical position of medium…