Across the OECD, enormous effort and investment has been made to reinforce the quality, production and use of education research in policy and practice. Despite this, using research in education remains a challenge for many countries and systems. The OECD launched the Strengthening the Impact of Education Research project to respond to this…

As the number of publicly funded early childhood education (ECE) programs increases, policymakers will need empirical evidence to justify the taxpayer investment. Such justification will require a stronger understanding of the essential components of an ECE program's design, as well as solid evidence on which components, or constellations of…

Whether the goal is to identify and describe trends and variation in populations, create new measures of key phenomena, or describe samples in studies aimed at identifying causal effects, description plays a critical role in the scientific process in general and education research in particular. Descriptive analysis identifies patterns in data to…

This report describes the approach that REL Northeast and Islands (REL-NEI) used to guide its eight research alliances toward collaboratively identifying a shared research agenda. A key feature of their approach was a two-workshop series, during which alliance members created a set of research questions on a shared topic of education policy and/or…

Knowledge derived from practice forms a significant portion of the knowledge base in the education field, yet is not accessible using existing empirical research methods. This paper describes a systematic, rigorous, grounded approach to collecting and analysing practice-based knowledge using the authors' research in teacher leadership as an…

As evidence-based reform becomes increasingly important in educational policy, it is becoming essential to understand how research design might contribute to reported effect sizes in experiments evaluating educational programs. The purpose of this study was to examine how methodological features such as types of publication, sample sizes, and…

This guide is designed to help districts and schools evaluate reform efforts related to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), including School Improvement Grants. It includes practical, how-to tips for conducting program evaluations, whether one takes a "do-it-yourself" approach or seeks outside assistance to evaluate reform…

This monograph looks first at opportunities provided by research in the adult literacy field and then identifies challenges to scientific research and suggests ways to address these challenges so that better evidence can be generated in the future. It has two goals that support the building of a stronger research base for the adult literacy…

This is one the fourth in a series of reports that examine key issues related to family and community connections with schools. These research syntheses are intended to help local school, community, and family leaders obtain useful information derived from rigorous research. In addition to presenting findings from recent research, the synthesis…

The postsecondary seminars report presents the distillation of the discussions and the recommendations of approximately 115 representatives of educational institutions, associations, and State and Federal agencies attending the Postsecondary Education Seminars Conference of 1976. The conference addressed the changing nature of postsecondary…

A framework is presented for use by the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education (BICSE) in advising the National Center for Education Statistics and the National Science Foundation on United States participation in international comparative studies of education. The framework may also be helpful in identifying areas of research…

The causes of rural/urban educational inequalities are multiple and diverse, and their analysis requires multi-disciplinary, longitudinal research. In this Polish study, preliminary examination of macrostatistical data on rural/urban disparities revealed the limitations of dichotomous analysis. In a broad, in-depth approach designed to develop a…

This monograph maintains that qualitative methods in research are no longer alternatives, but accepted practice in many research institutions. Consequently, the purpose of this anthology is to continue the search into "the forms of things unknown" and to re-examine those that are known by offering examples of new waves in research, based…

This document provides an overview of the research program of the Swedish National Board of Education (NBE) since 1962. The following subjects are discussed: (1) budget; (2) duration of the various projects; (3) fields of research; (4) transmission of knowledge; (5) transition from management by command to management by objectives; (6) research in…

This School Research Newsletter presents the research program of the National Swedish Board of Education (NBE), as adopted by the NBE Board of Directors in June 1982. The successive decisions on decentralization taken in the educational sector since 1976 have led also to a decision to alter the thrust of the research and development work within at…