This article introduces practitioners and researchers to the topic of missing data in the context of differential item functioning (DIF), reviews the current literature on the issue, discusses implications of the review, and offers suggestions for future research. A total of nine studies were reviewed. All of these studies determined what effect…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evaluates research studies that look at the effectiveness of education programs, products, practices, and policies, which the WWC calls "interventions." Many studies of education interventions make claims about impacts on students' outcomes. Some studies have designs that enable readers to make causal…

The purpose of this article is to clarify the discrepancy in the use of "queer" as a sexual identity classification in education survey research. This study extends the work completed by Dugan and Yurman (2011), who empirically demonstrated problems with treating LGB students as a homogenous population through collapsing all respondents…

This is the first book to gather and address what we have learned about the impacts and challenges of data-intensive teacher evaluation systems--a defining characteristic of the current education policy landscape. Expert researchers and practitioners speak to what we know (and what remains to be known) about evaluation measures themselves, the…

The intent of this research reporting guide is to provide the field of adult and juvenile justice corrections evaluators and researchers with a template for how to write their research studies for publication in the criminal justice field. In an effort to produce similar quality research, social science researchers are trying to adopt many of the…

This paper provides practical guidance for researchers who are designing and analyzing studies that randomize schools--which comprise three levels of clustering (students in classrooms in schools)--to measure intervention effects on student academic outcomes when information on the middle level (classrooms) is missing. This situation arises…

Since Topping published his literature review on peer assessment in 1998, the number of studies on this subject has doubled, if not tripled. However, along with this expansion, the diversity of peer assessment applications increased equally fast. Based on recent literature, this contribution focuses specifically on the diversity that has come to…

After months of waiting, the grant reviews came back: "excellent," "excellent," and "fair." What?! How can this be? Why is the third review so out of line with the first two? On more than one occasion a principal investigator (PI) has been frustrated not only by a negative funding decision but more so by the accompanying reviewer evaluation forms…

This report summarizes the complex research literature on quantitative methods for assessing how impacts of educational interventions on instructional practices and student learning differ across students, educators, and schools. It also provides technical guidance about the use and interpretation of these methods. The research topics addressed…

This paper reports on the development, self-critique and evolution of research methods for interpreting and understanding students' metacognition that were developed through the Metacognition and Reflective Inquiry (MRI) collaborative study. The MRI collaborative was a multi-year, multi-case, research study that investigated the elusive nature and…

As bibliometric indicators are objective, reliable, and cost-effective measures of peer-reviewed research outputs, they are expected to play an increasingly important role in research assessment/management. Recently, a bibliometric approach was developed and integrated within the evaluation framework of research funded by the National Cancer…

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate application of a new framework, the validation framework (VF), to assist researchers in evaluating mixed research studies. Based on an earlier work by Dellinger and Leech, a description of the VF is delineated. Using the VF, three studies from education, health care, and counseling fields are…

The case study method has not been as frequently used in international business (IB) research as quantitative methods. Moreover, it has been sometimes misused and quite often criticized. Still, it can be very useful for understanding such complex phenomena as the internationalization process or the management of multinational enterprises. Based on…

Evaluations that combine social science and law have tremendous potential to illuminate the effects of governmental policies and yield insights into how effectively policy makers' efforts achieve their aims. This potential is infrequently achieved, however, because such interdisciplinary research contains often overlooked substantive and…

The chapters in this book reflect the work of science and mathematics educators who have worked for many years at the international level. As members of the International Consortium for Research in Science and Mathematics Education, their work provides readers with issues, models, practices, and research results that have applicability and…