Tests of statistical significance often play a decisive role in establishing the empirical warrant of evidence-based research in education. The results from pattern-based assessment items, as introduced in this paper, are categorical and multimodal and do not immediately support the use of measures of central tendency as typically related to…

As part of the centennial of the Texas Music Educators Association (TMEA), I created a spreadsheet of all research posters listed in TMEA Conference Programs (1981-2020) and manuscripts published in Texas Music Education Research (1978-2018), including 1393 studies by 488 researchers. Factors examined included: growth of the research poster…

Historically, the predominant narrative framing Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) is that they are monolithic and underperforming, inscribed in a false dichotomy as "Hispanic-Serving" or merely "Hispanic-Enrolling" (Núñez, Hurtado, & Calderón Galdeano, 2015). Together, these narrative threads weave a deficit perspective…

Bui, Craig, and Imberman assessed the impact of gifted and talented programs on student achievement using regression discontinuity and random assignment to gifted magnet schools. In both analyses, they found minimal impact of the gifted and talented programs on student achievement. This commentary addresses two concerns associated with the study.…

This paper argues that typography can be an affective re/presentational strategy when used as a medium within the research framework of arts-based inquiry. Grounded in a larger comparative case study exploring the experiences of two elementary teachers in south Texas, the purpose of this paper is to (1) situate typography within the field of…

Recruitment is a key challenge for researchers conducting any large school-based study. Control is needed not only over the condition participants receive, but also over how the intervention is implemented, and may include restrictions in other areas of school and classroom functioning. We report here on our experiences in recruiting participants…

The National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ) recent review of university-based teacher preparation programs concluded the vast majority of such programs were inadequately preparing the nation's teachers. The study, however, has a number of serious flaws that include narrow focus on inputs, lack of a strong research base, missing standards,…

Using state achievement data that are openly accessible, this paper demonstrates the application of hierarchical linear modeling within the context of career technical education research. Three prominent approaches to analyzing clustered data (i.e., modeling aggregated data, modeling disaggregated data, modeling hierarchical data) are discussed…

While conducting a comparative research study in secondary Physical Education in South Korea and the United States, the question arose as to why the narrative inquiry research method we employed was chosen to study the experiences of teachers teaching the particular subject area to youth enrolled in four secondary schools (middle and high) in…

This chapter describes a partnership with four urban districts that aimed to develop an empirically grounded theory of action for improving the quality of mathematics instruction at scale. Each year, we conducted a data collection, analysis, and feedback cycle in each district that involved documenting the district's improvement strategies,…

Purpose: The prevailing theory of action underlying accountability is that holding schools and students accountable will increase educational output. While accountability's theory of action intuitively seemed plausible, at the point of No Child Left Behind's national implementation, little empirical research was available to either support or…

The objective of this paper is to provide some practical insight into the process of implementing large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCT) in educational settings and to provide general recommendations for researchers conducting education-based RCTs in the future. The authors draw their recommendations from their recent experiences…

Over the past two decades, community organizing has emerged as an effective force for school improvement. In the context of shrinking education funding, stubborn opportunity and achievement gaps between low-income and wealthy children and between children of color and White children, and polarizing debate on school reform, community organizing…

One purpose of educational research is to provide information about the likely impact of interventions or treatments on policy-relevant populations of students. Randomized experiments are useful for estimating the causal effects of interventions on the students in schools that participate in the experiments. Unfortunately, the samples of schools…

"Charter Schools in Eight States" uses longitudinal data from eight states to evaluate the effects of charter schools on achievement, attainment, integration, and competition. The findings are mixed. "Achievement": The study examines seven jurisdictions and finds insignificant effects on reading and math performance in five,…