The author of this commentary argues that physical scientists are attempting to advance knowledge in the so-called hard sciences, whereas education researchers are laboring to increase knowledge and understanding in an "extremely hard" but softer domain. Drawing on the work of Popper and Dewey, this commentary highlights the relative…

A common argument leveled against charter schools is that they attract the most motivated and intelligent students from already struggling public schools. Marcus Winters seeks to examine this claim, known as "cream-skimming," by comparing the performance of New York City's (NYC) charter middle schools with a set of traditional selective…

This commentary begins by summarizing the five contributions to this special issue and briefly recapping the background to the topic of student learning in higher education. Narrative and systematic reviews are compared, and the relative value of different bibliographic databases in the context of systematic reviews is assessed. The importance of…

In this rejoinder, the authors describe the aim of the original study as an effort to conduct a critical test of an important postulate underlying the Cross-Battery Assessment PSW approach (XBA PSW; Kranzler, Floyd, Benson, Zaboski, & Thibodaux, this issue). The authors used classification agreement analysis to examine the concordance between…

Tobin's work has been groundbreaking. Famously, he and his team put together a sophisticated comparative study of three ways of doing pre-school--in Japan, China, and the United States (1989). As such, this study has precedents in anthropology. What is unique in Tobin's work is that he got people from one place to comment on what they saw people…

Mathematics education seen both as a field of research and as a field of practice is a multicultural field. For a while, this essential characteristic of the field has been underestimated but this is no longer the case. Both theoretical frameworks and empirical research help us today better approach this phenomenon, understand its impact on the…

From the "sexual behaviour of young people" in the 1960s to "youth and the great recession" in the 2000s a steady current running through the author's educational research career has been "youth". Although the early stages of his career supplied the foundations for the topic of this paper--starting in 1962 with a…

This paper provides a commentary on the "condition" of geography education research as a field of study. It does so partly through a comparative discussion with another subject field in education, mathematics. In the context of fragility and comparative weakness of research in geography education, the paper urges researchers to keep focused on…

This commentary investigates the extent to which the control-value theory of emotions (Pekrun, 2006) is applicable in online learning environments. Four empirical studies in this special issue of "The Internet and Higher Education" explicitly used the control-value theory as their theoretical framework and several others have components of the…

When the author writes, her intention is to inform readers and to invite debate and discussion (or at least individual reflection) that continues after the work has been read and put aside. As a scientist with an interest in education, the author now feels able to submit some writings to a non-science educational journal, such as "Teaching in…

As a springboard into her response inspired by Noah Sobe's article, this author offers two possibilities for what cosmopolitanisms can tell about comparative and international education research. First, from her perspective, rooted in justice and peace studies, she is intrigued by several authors' assessments of cosmopolitanism as a cognitive or…

In England there are minority ethnic students with past family connections to the former British Empire, as well as recent Eastern European students, economic migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. One may wish to ask, do newly emerging racial identities conceptualise race and race relations in similar ways to existing minority ethnic communities?…

Jory Brass and Leslie David Burns provide a useful and informative review of research appearing in the "English Journal" ("EJ") and "Research in the Teaching of English" ("RTE") over the past 100 years. It is a bit unfortunate, if understandable, to exclude books and articles in other journals, because such a restriction excludes many pieces of…

Recently this journal published a research article examining the effectiveness of three different tests in identifying ethnically diverse gifted and talented children (Lewis, DeCamp-Fritson, Ramage, McFarland, & Archwamety, 2007, Volume 15, Number 1, pp. 38-42). After examining the proportions of Caucasian and non-Caucasian children identified…

Researchers have paid scant attention to the opportunities and the barriers associated with across-state study of college-transition policies, although the American states comprise a social system especially well suited for comparative analysis. What sorts of questions should researchers ask about college-transition policies and programs? How…