The COVID-19 pandemic influenced academia in many ways, impacting learners and teachers. This article is authored by six sustainable urban development doctoral researchers from various backgrounds and stages of their journey, and an academic advisor. The article is an outcome of remote collaboration through a substantial period during the…

Snowball sampling is frequently advocated and employed by qualitative social researchers. Under certain circumstances, however, it is prone to faltering and even failure. Drawing on two research projects where the snowball failed to roll, the paper identifies reasons for this stasis. It goes on to argue that there are alternative forms of…

As ethnographers we are familiar with methodological debates problematising ethnography's inherited and inherent connections to ideas of authenticity commonly mobilised to legitimate modes of representation. In this paper, we engage with the post-structural philosophies of Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler, to argue that methodological tools of…

Arts-based practices, although familiar in some areas of educational research have the capacity to surprise and to shock: they hold promise but also pose risks. In this essay we introduce arts-based research practices and in particular cut-up and collage. We invite readers to reflect on our experiences of arts-based educational research activities…

Hybrid communities using online and face-to-face communications to construct their practices are increasingly part of everyday life amongst people who have easy access to the internet. Researching these communities raises a number of challenges for researchers in the pursuit of ethical research. The paper begins by exploring what is understood by…

Threshold concepts were introduced nearly 10 years ago by Ray Land and Jan Meyer. This work has spawned four international conferences and hundreds of papers. Although the idea has clearly gained traction in higher education, this sub-field does not yet have a fully fledged research methodology or a strong critical discourse about methodology.…

Qualitative research makes it possible to reveal the often invisible but no less real complexities of social structures and opens venues for knowing human and social life more fully. Drawing on data from two qualitative research studies that used critical incidents as a device for investigating the nuances of human interaction within two…

The New Zealand Council for Educational Research's (NZCER's) Families and Communities Engagement (FACE) project is investigating ideas and practices involved in bringing together teachers, families, local communities and students to contribute to collective conversations and decisions about education. This report concerns a sub-project of FACE…

As a white, working middle-class adult queer from the Southwest USA, my subjective relation to the Mexican (im)migrant, poor, working, straight adolescent boys in California participating in my study was tentative, politicized, controversial, and surveilled from both social and individual lenses. Our relationships were also mutually caring,…

The Education Trust research report "Stuck Schools" suggests a framework for identifying chronically low-performing schools in need of turnaround. The study uses Maryland and Indiana to show that some low-performing schools make progress while others remain stagnant. The report has four serious problems of reliability and validity,…

The discussion of the gap between theory and practice has a long tradition in educational psychology and especially in research on learning and instruction. Starting with a short analysis of more or less elaborated approaches focusing on this problem, a complex procedure called "integrative research approach", specialized in reducing the gap…

The present status of the Elementary and Secondary School Desegregation Study, funded by the United States Commission on Civil Rights and currently underway, was evaluated. The study is designed to investigate the relationship between type and extent of desegre- gation activity and the resultant level of desegregation in the schools. This study is…

A comparison of 142 public administration doctoral dissertations from 1981 with 165 from 1990 found that the latter showed substantial improvement in quality based on 6 criteria (purpose, design, theory testing, causation, important topic, and cutting edge). Little improvement was found in selection of topics. (SK)

An approach to research that was conceptualized with the idea of replicating one study in dozens of locations simultaneously is described, focusing on two research projects with simultaneous replication. In 1988 researchers in 85 locations collected data in 276 schools as part of the Phi Delta Kappa Study of Schools At Risk. In 1982, data were…

Examines the research participation system in college and university psychology departments. Students in an elementary psychology course were surveyed regarding their opinion of the educational value of participating in a psychology experiment. Nearly all subjects reported positive feelings about their participation. (DB)