Assessing student achievement over multiple years is complicated by students' memberships in shifting upper-level nesting structures. These structures are manifested in (1) annual matriculation to different classrooms and (2) mobility between schools. Failure to model these shifting upper-level nesting structures may bias the inferences…

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of the exemplar methodology (ExM) as a method for selecting exemplars in education research. ExM is a systematic approach to selecting outliers that can be used to education researchers who investigate outliers to better understand phenomena among students, teachers, schools, and communities. While…

Preschool, understood as being both a physical and psychological environment, is, according to objectives in national curriculum, required to be inclusive for all those who attend it. Previous studies have identified the stereotypical norms of several everyday activities of preschools, including both interactions and premises. The aim of this…

Authentic participation involving jointly undertaken analysis of data and dissemination of findings is rarely evident in participatory research involving disabled people. This paper examines analysis and dissemination which offers greater participation, providing a theoretical underpinning for this approach. This conceptualization arises from…

This paper explores the contradictions of 'doing' feminist research, and how the materiality of engaging in fieldwork magnifies the gap between 'ideal' versus 'actual' feminist ways of conducting research. Drawing on my Doctoral research with British-Pakistani mothers of children with SEND, I explore the ethical and methodological challenges of…

While research on teaching qualitative methods in education has increased, few studies explore teaching qualitative data analysis software within graduate-level methods courses. During 2013, we required students in several such courses to use ATLAS.ti™ as a project management tool for their assignments. By supporting students' early experiences…

The article reports on a study of methodological innovation involving occupational therapy (OT) students in higher education (HE). It is based on an original project which examined the experiences and outcomes of non-traditional entrants to pre-registration OT education. A feature of the original project was the application of the epistemological…

We present here a reflexive and critical commentary and exemplification of the teaching and learning of research methodology. The paper focuses on the teaching/learning of qualitative data analysis. It is our belief that it is essential to "do" data analysis when learning about the process and that there are serious limitations to…

Hermeneutics is both a philosophical tradition and a methodological resource. In this qualitative study, hermeneutics provided, simultaneously, a framework and a methodology for understanding empathy in synchronous multimedia conferencing. As a framework for the design of the study, hermeneutics supported the overriding objective to understand the…

This paper provides analytic focus on the productive and editorial contexts of children and young people's image-making, making visible its implications for the analysis of photographs. Drawing on participatory research in which children and young people worked alongside researchers to create a visual narrative of their lived experiences of…

The draw-and-write technique for collecting data relating to both adult and children's perceptions of their world is receiving increasing attention as one which has status within the field of visual methods. This paper appraises the draw-and-write method and reflects on the methodological lessons learned by using the technique in two studies…

This paper uses data from the National Pupil Database to investigate the differences in "performance" across the range of science courses available following the 2006 Key Stage 4 (KS4) science reforms in England. This is a value-added exploration (from Key Stage 3 [KS3] to KS4) aimed not at the student or the school level, but rather at…

Quantitative secondary analysis of large-scale data can be combined with in-depth qualitative methods. In this paper, we discuss the role of this combined methods approach in examining the uptake of physics and chemistry in post compulsory schooling for students in England. The secondary data analysis of the National Pupil Database (NPD) served…

This brief research report gives an overview of a visually based methodology that has recently been used to shed light on situated decision-making in a high stakes educational assessment environment. Looking carefully at the feedback interactions taking place between senior and less senior examiners, the project aim was to gain insight into the…

In this article, we set out to explore what we describe as the use of video in various modalities. For us, modality is a synthesizing construct that draws together and differentiates between the notion of "video" both as a method and as a methodology. It encompasses the use of the term video as both product and process, and as a data…