Principal leadership has been widely regarded as a powerful catalyst for school improvement and student learning. This article presents a multivariate meta-analysis of 42 empirical studies, published between 2000 and 2020, that examined the effects of principal leadership on student achievement in the United States. The focus is on the conceptual…

Background: Using meta-analytic review techniques, this study synthesized the results of 79 unpublished studies about the nature of transformational school leadership (TSL) and its impact on the school organization, teachers, and students. This corpus of research associates TSL with 11 specific leadership practices. These practices, as a whole,…

In recent years, policy makers and researchers once again have embraced the traditional idea that quasi-experimental research designs (or reasonable facsimiles) can provide the sort of valid and generalizable knowledge about "what works" that educational researchers had promised--but never really produced--during the previous century. Although…

Background: This report continues in the lineage of reviews of research in educational leadership and management by examining methodological approaches used by doctoral researchers in studying principal instructional leadership. Research Design: The article reviews the full set of 130 doctoral dissertations completed over the past three decades…

Much of educational administration research suffers from lack of conformity between data analysis and research design, inattention to the test/retest stability of measurement instruments, and the use of statistics for nominal or interval data with ordinal data, random-sample statistics with nonrandom samples, and unnecessarily complex statistical…

Explains the characteristics and importance of random assignment in experimental research on education. Considers factors supporting causal inferences, the nature of "assignment units," differences between random sampling and random assignment, the characteristics of randomization tests, forms of random assignment, and effects of experimental…

Highlights the conceptual importance of defining administrative processes as units of analysis when conducting case studies of educational administration, identifies methodological advantages of a systematic approach to stratified cluster sampling, and suggests that information management is an important aspect of the school administrator's job.…

Discusses the characteristics and development of a computer simulation laboratory for educational administration research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and reviews an experimental study performed at the laboratory on stress in decision-making. Explores how simulations provide researchers access to experimental conditions unavailable…

Reviews the history and conclusions of school effectiveness research, which focuses on student achievement, and of school improvement research, which emphasizes educational innovation per se; analyzes the methodologies of these two lines of inquiry. Distills from both bodies of literature seven school characteristics that constitute excellence.…