In December 2014, the National Center for Education Research (NCER) in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education convened a technical working group (TWG) of experts in the field of rural education to provide input on research needs in this field and how research could be more relevant and useful to rural…

Calls for closer connections among disciplines can be heard throughout the world of scholarly research, from major universities to the National Institutes of Health. "In Defense of Disciplines" presents a fresh and daring analysis of the argument surrounding interdisciplinarity. Challenging the belief that blurring the boundaries between…

This research uses a qualitative research approach, specifically a single-case study method, to explore the journey to school improvement of one struggling school district that is involved in year 2 of a 3-year turnaround plan. The single-case study method allows the researcher to use several data collection methods to build a picture of the…

This article reflects on a few of the major intellectual contributions Ann and Rud Turnbull and their colleagues at the Beach Center on Family and Disability have made to their academic fields and to the wider society. The focus is on some of their key ideas that have been particularly innovative and important in changing the way scholars, policy…

This paper provides a history of the standardized testing and accountability movement, the curriculum standards attached to the accountability movement, and the attempted shift to common core. Student poverty and its impact on student achievement the focus of this paper. Recognizing the impact of poverty on student achievement as measured by…

While the model of students and staff working in partnership to enhance university education is well-established internationally, it is still an emerging field in Australia where most of such initiatives involve only small numbers of students. This paper examines the opportunities and challenges for students-as-co-inquirers initiatives in…

Language attrition research has developed in several clearly delimited phases spanning, roughly, each of the three decades between 1982 and 2012 (see Kopke & Schmid 2004 for a more detailed overview and analysis). The first phase was an era of stocktaking, with a number of symposia, collected volumes and special issues of journals. All of…

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are increasingly used to evaluate educational interventions in the UK. However, RCTs remain controversial for some elements of the research community. This paper argues that the widespread use of the term "gold standard" to describe RCTs is problematic, as it implies that other research methods are…

The move from learning science from representations to learning science with representations has many potential and undocumented complexities. This thematic analysis partially explores the trends of representational uses in science instruction, examining 80 research studies on diagram use in science. These studies, published during 2000-2014, were…

The following commentary presents an overview of earlier studies of discourse functions and syntactic complexity as well as recent investigations that focus on interaction and measures of syntactic and lexical complexity in learners' output in traditional classrooms and computer-mediated environments. Recent studies emphasize the need for better…

More than 20 years into the implementation of public charter schools, the U.S. experience can inform policymakers and others about how to achieve the best possible results through charter school policies. This paper describes the history and current state of the charter school movement, presents a conceptual model of the charter school system, and…

STEM faculty at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) have partnered with teachers and administrators in the Omaha Public Schools (OPS) to implement a Teacher-Researcher Partnership Program. This program establishes resources and infrastructure that engage K-12 science teachers in scientific research experiences. In the first implementation of…

The purpose of this article is to offer critical notes on inclusive education research in the U.S. We discuss issues germane to conceptual clarity and the ways in which inclusive education interacts with reforms that share equity goals, noting disruptions and unintended consequences that arise at the nexus of these reforms. In addition, we…

Although there has been a great deal of debate about the effectiveness of charter schools in the research literature, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to English language learners (ELLs) in charter schools. Moreover, the charter school research has predominantly focused on whether or not charter schools are effective rather than…

The commentaries in this special issue as well as the articles they address contribute to the knowledge base about advanced learners, how they are identified, and how they are best served. In our Editors' commentary, we have organized our thoughts following the same order in which the commentaries appear in the remainder of this issue. As the…