This reflective commentary on the character and role of methodology in educational and social inquiry recounts my 45-year journey as an applied researcher and evaluator, primarily in the domain of education. The journey starts in graduate school in the early 1970s, where the methodological challenge was to master "the proper methods, properly…

In this article, I respond to Noel Card's "Methodological Issues in Measuring the Development of Character." I focus on the ways in which social scientific knowledge represents human constructions of the world and the implications of this stance for the measurement of character. Further, I consider how context influences those…

The article "Research by design: Design-based research and the higher degree research student" (Kennedy-Clark, 2013) appeared in the "Journal of Learning Design" Volume 6, Issue 2 in 2013. Two years on, Shannon Kennedy-Clark reflects upon her original article. Upon being asked to revisit this article the author reflected upon…

This commentary details the process aimed at developing the Inaugural National Leadership Education Research Agenda. The goal of the project is to create a guiding document to assist in further defining Leadership Education as a discipline and provide directional research priorities for that discipline. The commentary provides a foundational…

Klingner and Boardman (this issue) offer a cogent and compelling argument for opening the door for the acceptance and use of mixed methods in special education research. Self-identifying as pragmatists, they embody this paradigmatic view by focusing on the utility, efficacy, and accuracy of mixed methods, an argument that should appeal to the…