Teacher research is lauded as a beneficial enterprise both for practitioners and for learners. However, teachers are sometimes accused of not possessing the necessary knowledge and skills to conduct research effectively. This article focuses on the need for teacher-researchers to find means of addressing the methodological challenges of engaging…

This article is a response to the methodological problems I experienced during fieldwork. It follows that the article is an experiment of creating alternative possibilities for thinking about ethnocentrism as a phenomenon in transformation in a contemporary, innovative, higher educational setting. Throughout the article, I argue for the…

Randomized clinical trials underpin evidence-based clinical practice, but flaws in their conduct may lead to biased estimates of intervention effects and hence invalid treatment recommendations. The main approach to the empirical study of bias is to collate a number of meta-analyses and, within each, compare the results of trials with and without…

This study illustrates how the cognitive interviewing (CI) method can provide qualitative evidence of item, construct, and method bias in cross-cultural research. CI was conducted with participants from the Netherlands and Spain, who responded to quality-of-life (QoL) items included in international survey research projects. Qualitative findings…

This article contests the emphasis that is frequently placed upon child-friendly methods in research with young children. Focusing upon a series of research encounters from a doctoral study of play in an early years classroom, I examine my interactions with the children and their social and material worlds and draw upon these encounters to…

The application of new methods and measures in domains with few methodological traditions of that kind often presents researchers with a challenge; they may have to take up the task of developing their understanding of the phenomenon while, at the same time, creating the practices for its study. For us, the method was eye tracking, and the topic,…

This paper proposes a strategy for ethnographically investigating politically disparate education organizations. I develop the notion of researching as a critical secretary: a method of participant-observation conducted alongside those observed to hold the least formal power. Drawing on data from an initial empirical effort to implement this…

This paper examines the experiences of educational researchers undertaking fieldwork within three Central Asian countries -- Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Drawing on interviews with educational researchers from within and outside the region, the findings show that researchers encounter numerous ethical and methodological challenges in the…

The article discusses salient factors that influence the current context within which homeschooling occurs. Individual states have applied various approaches to establish regulations that both preserve the rights of homeschooling parents and fulfill the state's obligation to ensure that its residents receive the education to which they are…

Indigenous students, a subgroup of the Australian student population, produce poorer educational outcomes and continue to produce persistently lower attendance rates than non-Indigenous peers. Currently, governments collect and monitor student attendance as an indicator of students' educational achievement and a key performance measure of schools…

This article examines whether the way that PISA models item outcomes in mathematics affects the validity of its country rankings. As an alternative to PISA methodology, a two-parameter logistic model is applied to PISA mathematics item data from Italy and Spain for the year 2009. In the estimation procedure, item difficulty and dispersion…

This article maps the territory of visual ethnography as a key and accessible research methodology in education. It aims to provide an overview and to present theory and practice for future research. The origins and principles of visual ethnography are disclosed as well as some methods to gather data. From the premise that either created by the…

Anxiety in autism is commonly reported by parents, but teacher reports of anxiety in their students with autism have received little attention. This paper presents the results from the first systematic review on anxiety in children with autism at school. Six intervention studies (five of which were based upon cognitive-behavioural therapy) and 26…

Much of qualitative interview research encourages researcher reflexivity, though there seems some uncertainty of how one actually does reflexive research. We show in this case that reflexivity includes examinations of the researcher in relation to the interviewed "other," and that transcriptions--a common element of interview-based…

Methods textbooks play a role in socializing a new generation of researchers about ethical research. How do undergraduate social research methods textbooks portray harm, its prevalence, and ways to mitigate harm to participants? We conducted a content analysis of ethics chapters in the 18 highest-selling undergraduate textbooks used in sociology…