Researchers tasked with understanding the effects of educational technology innovations face the challenge of providing evidence of causality. Given the complexities of studying learning in authentic contexts interwoven with technological affordances, conducting tightly-controlled randomized experiments is not always feasible nor desirable. Today,…

Bayesian statistical methods have become more feasible to implement with advances in computing but are not commonly used in educational research. In contrast to frequentist approaches that take hypotheses (and the associated parameters) as fixed, Bayesian methods take data as fixed and hypotheses as random. This difference means that Bayesian…

This third in a series of articles on work conducted at the Texas Center for Educational Technology and the University of North Texas focuses on research designs for teachers to determine the impact of technology in the classroom. Highlights include research and the scientific method; qualitative versus quantitative research; and statistical…