Context: A perennial problem in applied statistics is the inability to justify strong claims about cause-and-effect relationships without full knowledge of the mechanism determining selection into treatment. Few research designs other than the well-implemented random assignment study meet this requirement. Researchers have proposed partial…

This study develops a tool to identify errors in the presentation of natural laws based on the epistemology and ontology of the Scientific Realism of Mario Bunge. The tool is able to identify errors of different types: (1) epistemological, in which the law is incorrectly presented as data correlation instead of as a pattern of causality; (2)…

Educational researchers are not engaged in discovering mechanistic universal truths sought by positivists or tidy prescriptions about what works. Instead, they provide guidelines and interpretive material to liberate the teacher's intelligence so that the teacher can use whatever ability he or she can achieve. (SLD)