In educational sciences, 90s were the scene of the paradigmatic wars, as the researchers of quantitative or qualitative research only defended the ideas of the type of research they used and they constantly criticized the counter-paradigm. While this struggle is going on, mixed method research has emerged, a pragmatist approach that believes both…

This case study examines the key steps and challenges that were involved in a mixed methods research project relating to Japanese first-year medical students' English academic vocabulary learning. Conducting mixed methods research can be both conceptually and administratively challenging under any circumstances. However, this study was especially…

David Berliner argued in 2002 that educational research is the hardest science of all. His arguments addressed the complexity that context plays in educational settings and the difficulties of applying research designs that were largely developed and refined in the natural sciences arena to fields of human behavior. In this article, it is argued…

Universities have used an array of incentives to increase academic publications, which are highly rewarded in the South African higher education funding formula. While all universities use indirect incentives, such as linking promotion and probation to publication, the mechanisms used in some institutions have taken a very direct form, whereby…

This article is a methodological critique of a survey process undertaken with international undergraduate students at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Despite following best practice surveying protocols this research project initially achieved a 5% response rate. The research team had to change its approach part-way through the process…

Background: Interventions for offenders with intellectual disabilities (ID) have used cognitive variables as measures of treatment outcome. However, the relevance of cognitive variables to offending in people with intellectual disabilities is unclear. This review aimed to evaluate the evidence for a relationship between cognitive variables and…

Who is to be included in educational research? How might the researched be included within educational research practices? Why does it matter that educational research practices should be inclusive and not exclusionary? This article draws on Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue to critique reductive and specialist answers to these questions and,…

Many ethical concerns in online big data research stem from a pervasive assumption that data are disembodied and place-less. While some scholars have begun addressing the ethical dilemmas of big data, few offer approaches or tools that fully grapple with the situatedness of online data and its ethical implications. We draw on feminist new…

This paper presents a model for developing research questions that are aligned to research aims for research design in e-learning. The model is proposed as a solution to the on-going problem of heterogeneity of research problems. The model is based on Burrell and Morgan's four social paradigms, and integrates four research aims, namely, explore,…

John Raven has the capacity to see a bigger picture and highlight some of the causes of failures of that bigger picture. In barely 6000 words, he manages to outline several meta and micro-level problems that have led to the position he outlines regarding evidence-based interventions. This achievement should not be overlooked; what he has managed…

Gert Biesta is one of the leading contemporary educational theorists. He was a keynote speaker at the recent ATEA Conference (July, 2019) at the Sunshine Coast in Australia and generously gave Stephen Heimans some time for an interview in which Gert talked about his latest work and the trajectory of his thinking and writing over his career.

Everyone knows what a school is, but the question of what constitutes an individual school is more complex than one would expect. Since not all individual records that appear in state or federal data files are schools, this creates a persistent challenge for educational researchers. In order to ensure that we have an accurate accounting of charter…

Research on disproportionate representation in special education has potential to influence policy in ways that rectify educational inequities. In this study, we investigated how disproportionality researchers have operationalized dis-ability, identified key themes and theories used in disproportionality research, and evaluated the coherence…

This paper tries to probe the common quality issues in academic master theses of education majors and propose some possible countermeasures. The study sampled and evaluated 275 academic master theses of education majors in China to examine common quality issues in them, and used a questionnaire to survey 210 academic master's degree candidates of…

This case study investigates the practical and methodological challenges associated with conducting interviews with high-ranking public figures ("elites") in politically fragile environments, with a particular focus on education and gender issues in Turkey. The original research utilised a qualitative methodology, emphasising an…