Situations of catastrophic social change, such as COVID-19, raise complex, interdisciplinary research questions that intersect health, education, economics, psychology, and social behavior and require mixed methods research. The pandemic has been a quickly evolving phenomenon, which pressures the time necessary to perform mixed methods research.…

Little attention has been paid to the processes that are involved in making sense of the role dissonance between sources of data has played in the development of theoretical insight. This methodologically oriented investigation considers an unusual set of case exemplars that used mixed methods and dialogic forms of mixing in ways that produced…

Digital technology has provided users with new connections that have reset our understanding of social architectures. As a reaction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data, the educational field has rearranged its structure to consider human and non-human stakeholders and their actions on digital platforms. In light of this increasingly…

This paper discusses some of the recurrent issues which the authors have noticed in educational research. These might be concerned with the nature of social science research, such as its representation of the reality of student learning, the role for replication studies, and the tolerance for disagreements. There are also issues related to the…

Mixed methods research requires integration of qualitative and quantitative data. However, there is debate about how to define integration and what is required for integration to occur. This paper describes a mixed methods research project which revisits datasets from different eras, which were originally instigated for different purposes and had…

This chapter presents an innovative, cross-disciplinary methodological approach to systematically reviewing and comparing large bodies of literature using big data, Natural Language Processing, network analysis, and supplementary qualitative analysis. The approach is demonstrated through an analysis of the literature surrounding four common…

Big qualitative data (Big Qual), or research involving large qualitative data sets, has introduced many newly evolving conventions that have begun to change the fundamental nature of some qualitative research. In this methodological essay, we first distinguish big data from big qual. We define big qual as data sets containing either primary or…

Education reform is inevitable; however, the journey of reform must ensure that educators are equipped to meet the diverse needs of all children within the classrooms throughout. Data-driven decision making is going to be the driving force for making that happen. This mixed model research was designed to show how implementing data-driven…

School leaders and principals have an obligation to use every tool at their disposal to maximize student achievement. All students deserve the best use of data to inform the decision-making of those entrusted to deliver the finest education available to them. The purpose of this study was to ascertain the perceptions of principals in Los Angeles…

The data team intervention was designed to support Dutch secondary schools in using data while developing a solution to an educational problem. A data team can build school-wide capacity for data use through knowledge sharing among data team members, and knowledge brokerage between the team and other colleagues. The goal of this mixed-methods…

A growing number of schools are implementing PLCs to address school improvement, staff engage with data to identify student needs and determine instructional interventions. This is a starting point for engaging in the iterative process of learning for the teach in order to increase student learning (Hord & Sommers, 2008). The iterative process…

School districts increasingly push school leaders to utilize multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, such as observation ratings or value-added scores, in making talent management decisions, including teacher hiring, assignment, support, and retention, but we know little about the local conditions that promote or impede these processes. We…

For school districts, the increasing importance of using data for continuous improvement has become part of the educational landscape under accountability. In many ways, educators have become inundated with data but not always in ways that provide them with a full picture to adequately weigh decisions for their specific context. One way to use…

Schools in many different countries are increasingly expected to use data for school improvement. However, schools struggle with the implementation of data use, because building human capacity around data use in education has not received enough attention. Educators urgently need to develop data literacy skills for being able to use data. For…

Why conduct education research? To answer questions that we have about our students, add to our knowledge of good teaching, and investigate new theories based on observations we have made in our classrooms, schools, or communities. This qualitative research methods case illustrates a study we undertook to better understand how teachers use close…