In higher education, online students are often precluded from research assistantships that are more accessible for campus-based students. At a highly ranked institution for online learning, we developed the Undergraduate Research Program (URP) to address this gap in opportunities for online students. The URP is designed to engage fully distanced…

Canada does not have a national system wide assessment of the socioeconomic impacts of academic research. We do not have a Research Excellence Framework such as in the United Kingdom. Yet Canadian researchers, funders and institutions are interested in research impact, particularly the methods and processes for generating impacts to complement…

Over the last decade, the idea of societal impact resulting from publicly funded research has changed from being a relatively fringe concern related to high-technology entrepreneurship and spin-off companies to becoming an increasingly important public policy concern. This has stimulated academic science policy research to investigate the impact…

In this theoretical paper, we advocate for educational researchers to embrace co-design as a means of fostering sustainable solutions in educational settings. While co-design has been increasingly recognized for its collaborative potential, we suggest that its effectiveness can be further enhanced by drawing from three complementary perspectives:…

Numerous reviews have synthesized the empirical research on the effectiveness of teacher education, highlighting teacher education effectiveness research (TEER) as an emerging research paradigm. Our systematic search identified 27 reviews related to TEER, wherein teacher education is broadly understood as comprising all stages of teacher…

Background: Active Support is a staff practice that aims to increase engagement of people with intellectual disabilities. This study seeks to: (1) identify the outcomes of staff using Active Support and how these are measured; (2) identify how the views of people with intellectual disabilities have been included in Active Support research. Method:…

Background: Parents with intellectual disability experience high rates of child removal, which affects their well-being. Method: Participatory action research (PAR) was undertaken with eight parents with intellectual disability who had children removed from their care. Parents were interviewed before and after the PAR. Three themes emerged: a safe…

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a widely adopted non-parametric technique for evaluating R&D performance. However, traditional DEA models often struggle to provide reliable solutions in the presence of data uncertainty. To address this limitation, this study develops a novel robust super-efficiency DEA approach to evaluate R&D…

Background/purpose: Collaborative Online International Learning projects have emerged as practices that connect students from different countries. Such actions can be appealing to universities but also arouse uncertainty. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to explore COIL experiences in HE reported in the scientific literature in terms of…

This paper examines the scalability of the results from the Tennessee Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Project, a prominent educational experiment. We explore how the misalignment between the experimental design and the econometric model affects researchers' ability to learn about the intervention's scalability. We document heterogeneity…

Extended reality (XR) such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) has been heralded as a particularly promising technology for autistic people. However, prior studies have centered around curing or ameliorating deficits and impairments and are typically conducted by non-disabled and non-autistic researchers. Using co-design and a…

Regression discontinuity (RD) designs have gained significant popularity as a quasi-experimental device for evaluating education programs and policies. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of RD designs, focusing on the continuity-based framework, the most widely adopted RD framework. We first review the fundamental aspects of RD…

Educational robotics is presented as a resource increasingly present in the early childhood education stage, allowing the development of STEM competences in a practical and motivating way. Due to the evolution of its use in the classroom, the aim of this paper was to analyse and evaluate research on robotics applied to early childhood education.…

The use of Mixed Methods (MM) in evaluation has increasingly become a valuable asset in evaluators' methodological toolbox. Despite prolific research on various aspects of mixed methods, from typologies to ontological debates, there remains a dearth of empirically derived evidence on effectively communicating MM findings. This lack of empirical…

The purpose of this study was to assess and describe the status of program evaluation within the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) sites. The National Science Foundation's REU program supports thousands of undergraduates annually in hands-on, immersive research experiences under the mentorship of…