Pressing questions about the merits of market accountability in K-12 education have spawned a large scholarly literature. Unfortunately, much of that literature is of limited relevance, and much of it is misleading. The studies most widely cited in the United States used intense scrutiny of a few small-scale, restriction-laden U.S. school choice…

Many years of experience make it difficult to believe that survey answers are mostly unambiguous. For example, by going through accessible studies, a lot of problems concerning memory can be identified in the field of living conditions and in other domains. Consequently, it may be claimed that facts are seldom stored in an easily accessible…

The relationship status of study participants (e.g., daters, cohabitors, marrieds, or unmarrieds) has implications for understanding dating and mate selection. Procedures used in studies may blur or ignore status distinctions. The authors examined methods used in 791 studies published from 1991-2001. Most commonly, status of participants is…

Education research rarely lends itself to large scale experimental research and true randomization, leaving the researcher to quasi-experimental designs. The problem with quasi-experimental research is that underlying factors may impact group selection and lead to potentially biased results. One way to minimize the impact of non-randomization is…

This chapter summarizes ten selected issues and common problems that arise in most assessment research projects. These include: (1) the uses of grades in assessment; (2) institutional review boards; (3) research design as a compromise; (4) standardized testing; (5) self-reported measures; (6) missing data; (7) weighting data; (8) conditional…

We review the history and current trends in the field of Educational Data Mining (EDM). We consider the methodological profile of research in the early years of EDM, compared to in 2008 and 2009, and discuss trends and shifts in the research conducted by this community. In particular, we discuss the increased emphasis on prediction, the emergence…

Undergraduate and graduate engineering training differ significantly. The former looks to established protocols and formulas to design and control processes while the latter often involves questioning established protocols and formulas to better suit and describe phenomena. Although we do not dispute the benefits of practical hands-on approaches,…

Evidenced in several now classic reviews of the field, much has been made of theoretical and methodological "difference" with regard to research in the sociology of education. Although such renditions often constitute important intellectual contributions, the authors suggest that it is increasingly important to read across theoretical and…

Research in fields other than education has found that studies with small sample sizes tend to have larger effect sizes than those with large samples. This article examines the relationship between sample size and effect size in education. It analyzes data from 185 studies of elementary and secondary mathematics programs that met the standards of…

Content analysis has dominated computer-mediated communication and educational technology studies for some time, and a review of its practices applied to online corpus of data or messages is overdue. We are confronted with complexity given the various foci, nuances and models for theorising learning and applying methods. One common suggestion to…

This article explores children's participation in research, from the perspectives of researchers who have conducted research with children. Researchers' reports, gained using an email interviewing method, suggest that children's participation rights are particularly compromised when the potential child participants are considered vulnerable and…

Presented at the quarterly meeting of the New York Area SAS Users-Group in December 2008. In virtually any research context, there is likely to be opportunity to apply mixed-models--of which repeated-measures, multilevel, hierarchical and random- and fixed-effect models are specific types-- that improve upon their traditional linear or generalized…

In this article, the authors share their views on the article by Dr. Radford, which raises a number of key issues that have a great impact on the future of postgraduate training and funding as well as on postgraduate students' future careers. The first issue relates to higher education in which the teaching at undergraduate level is evermore being…

In this article, the author seeks a middle path through which to traverse the "tricky ground" of Indigenous research; a middle path that will hopefully find "in-between spaces" open to new epistemological pathways, through which new voices and ideas can be heard within the social sciences and, in particular, within geography.…

I chronicle the changes in my research, especially those that have moved me closer to C. Wright Mills's call for a "sociological imagination" and Dell Hymes's reinvented anthropology. As I spend more time attempting to create and describe equitable educational environments and less time documenting educational inequality, I have adopted a version…