In "Holding Accountability to Account: How Scholarship and Experience in Other Fields Inform Exploration of Performance Incentives in Education"--a paper presented at the National Center on Performance Incentives research to policy conference in February--Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, argues educational…

This review presents an overview of selected articles on the leniency hypothesis: the idea that students give higher evaluations to instructors who grade more leniently. Such articles comprise a small subset of the voluminous research on student evaluations of teaching (SETs). In this diverse literature, research methods and aims have frequently…

The author describes her 30 years of experience in the design and conduct of a series of large-scale randomized controlled studies in the field of public welfare. She describes how these studies came about, what lessons can be drawn about research methods, what was learned about the effectiveness of these programs (the National Supported Work…

In a nonrandomized or observational study, propensity scores may be used to balance observed covariates and trajectory groups may be used to control baseline or pretreatment measures of outcome. The trajectory groups also aid in characterizing classes of subjects for whom no good matches are available and to define substantively interesting groups…

This study investigated self-presentation bias in the self-reports of teachers about their practices in six topic areas in educational technology (Instructional Design, Assessment, Learner-Centered Instruction, Curriculum Alignment, Attitudes about Computers, and Use of Computers with Students). Subjects were 50 middle-school teachers. Data were…

Our discussion of social justice begins by embracing both "distribution" and "recognition" aspects of social relations (Vincent, 2003). The first aspect considers the way that goods, knowledge, skills, rights, etc. are distributed among social groups; the second aspect focuses on aspects of society structuring social encounters…

The conceptualization and measurement of key job characteristics has not changed greatly for most social scientists since the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and Quality of Employment surveys were created, despite their recognized limitations. However, debates over the roles of job skill requirements, technology, and new management practices in…

One strategy to prevent confusion as new paradigms emerge is to have professionals in the area develop and use a standard model of the phenomenon in question. The development and use of standard models in physics, genetics, archaeology, and cosmology have been very productive. The cognitive revolution in psychology and education has produced a…

In this paper, a panel of four new faculty discuss the challenges they have faced and the lessons they have learned in attempting to create a research agenda for themselves. To provide a point of reference, brief biographical sketches are provided of the panel members and the responder. The panelists' comments are provided on several principal…

Failure to separate judicial reasoning (the application of rules) from legislative reasoning (the justification of rules) in earlier studies is claimed to invalidate most previous developmental research using moral dilemma interviews. Two studies used a novel method of scoring moral dilemma interviews that separates judicial from legislative…

This consideration of validity issues in self-study research argues that issues of validity in such research are first and foremost moral arguments about educational practice. The arguments point to narrative study because versions of narrative work are considered a necessary component of self-study. Narrative research has been criticized on…

This study compared the formation of the names of Victorian women writers in the Library of Congress name authority file to the formation of names in selected bibliographic tools created by humanities scholars. A purposive sample of 52 writers, divided into 12 problem categories derived from Chapter 22 of the "Anglo-American Cataloguing…

In the early 1980s, Shakeshaft and Hanson reviewed the 10 volumes of "Educational Administration Quarterly" (EAQ) that were published during the 1970s for evidence of androcentric bias. Androcentric bias is said to occur when the theory and research is informed by the male perspective. The underlying assumption is that the experience of…

A test of statistical significance is a procedure for determining how likely a result is assuming a null hypothesis to be true with randomization and a sample of size n (the given size in the study). Randomization, which refers to random sampling and random assignment, is important because it ensures the independence of observations, but it does…

This guide is designed to assist adult educators who are also first-time practitioner-researchers. It is organized in three parts. Part 1 is an introduction to practitioner research. The following steps of designing and conducting a research project are examined in a section on strategies and methods: identify a research question, collect data,…