This article reviews the origins and use of the terms quasi-experiment and natural experiment. It demonstrates how the terms conflate whether variation in the independent variable of interest falls short of random with whether researchers find, rather than intervene to create, that variation. Using the lens of assignment--the process driving…

Over the past decade, transdisciplinary research has been faced with increasing demands by research policy and funding bodies to make its contribution to dealing with complex societal problems more transparent. In the literature, there is a range of methodological attempts to trace and describe the effects of transdisciplinary research, but these…

Background: The technological age of the twenty-first century has witnessed an upsurge in the demand for STEM education. Early childhood STEM learning and teaching has sparked attention among researchers. Purpose: This study aims to provide a holistic review of current STEM research in Early Childhood Education (ECE). Sample: We conducted a…

The Q-matrix played a key role in implementations of diagnostic classification models (DCMs) or cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) -- a family of psychometric models that are gaining attention in providing diagnostic information on students' mastery of cognitive attributes or skills. Using two Monte Carlo simulation studies, this dissertation…

The Campbellian validity typology has been used as a foundation for outcome evaluation and for developing evidence-based interventions for decades. As such, randomized control trials were preferred for outcome evaluation. However, some evaluators disagree with the validity typology's argument that randomized controlled trials as the best design…

We examine how the politics of knowledge production limit research on the relationship between immigration status and social inequality. We centre the practices of methodological nationalism in Canada, a traditional country of permanent immigration in which temporary migration has become a core feature of the immigration system. In this case,…

In the mixed methods research (MMR) literature, the term paradigm is used in a number of ways to support very different accounts. This article aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about the relationship between MMR and paradigms by analyzing two main claims discussed in the literature: (a) MMR is a new paradigm and (b) MMR mixes different…

Text classification has allowed researchers to analyze natural language data at a previously impossible scale. However, a text classifier is only as valid as the the annotations on which it was trained. Further, the cost of training a classifier depends on annotators' ability to quickly and accurately apply the coding scheme to each text. Thus,…

Single-case design (SCD) is a research methodology that may be utilized to establish the presence of a functional relation between an independent and dependent variable. Recent research has found the design to frequently be used within school psychology in the evaluation of intervention procedures. However, the overall prevalence of the design…

When conceived of as both a research strategy and mode to present findings, vignettes can be combined with various qualitative methodologies in higher education research. Rather than being a discipline unto itself, higher education research is best understood as a multi and cross-disciplinary field of study that, we contend, is made richer by its…

A valuable extension of the single-rating regression discontinuity design (RDD) is a multiple-rating RDD (MRRDD). To date, four main methods have been used to estimate average treatment effects at the multiple treatment frontiers of an MRRDD: the "surface" method, the "frontier" method, the "binding-score" method, and…

This study revisits the task of case selection in case study research, proposing a new typology of strategies that is explicit, disaggregated, and relatively comprehensive. A secondary goal is to explore the prospects for case selection by "algorithm," aka "ex ante," "automatic," "quantitative,"…

This paper, of theoretical nature, explores the levels of approach and abstraction of research in the field of education policy: description, analysis and understanding. Such categories were developed based on concepts of Bourdieu's theory and on the grounds of epistemological studies focused on education policy and meta-research. This paper…

Baeysian Network Meta-Analysis represents a rather unique challenge in assessing the quality of included studies. Prior efforts to synthesize computer based scaffolding are in need of a closer examination of research quality. This study examines two quality metrics for meta-analysis, study design, and risk of bias (Higgins et al., 2011). Lower…

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…