This article is based on a presentation that was made at the 2014 annual meeting of the editorial board of "Health Education & Behavior." The article addresses critical issues related to standards of scientific reporting in journals, including concerns about external and internal validity and reporting bias. It reviews current…

Structure and organization seems to be at the root of many of the questions raised about institutional behaviour; however, with respect to research on university capacity building, few studies have examined research organizational problems, particularly in developing countries. This study investigates academic reactions to the structure and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for reconceptualising research on school autonomy to redress the limitations of traditional research, strengthen the conceptual links between school autonomy and learning outcomes and offer a range of new strategies for studying the interplay of school autonomy, leadership and learning.…

The author has been asked to respond to Lodge, Hansen, and Cottrell's recent (2015) paper in this journal and they have done a very thorough and scholarly job of dissecting the weaknesses of modality preference theories. They clearly and carefully analyse the nature of the evidence for modality preference and conclude that there is little if any…

Faculty and students may benefit from using a well-designed instrument to meet the objectives of both institutional assessment requirements and direct student learning in the discipline. This paper discusses how accounting rubrics can be used to evaluate and assess student learning by providing an organized approach to determine student success on…

Good practice in primary research has evolved over many decades of research in applied linguistics to counter human fallibility and biases. Surprisingly, perhaps, synthesising such research in an entire field has only recently started to develop its own methodologies and recommendations. This paper outlines some of the issues involved, especially…

Mobile technologies, specifically smartphones, offer social scientists a potentially powerful approach to examine the social world. They enable researchers to collect information that was previously unobservable or difficult to measure, expanding the realm of empirical investigation. For research that concerns resource-poor and hard-to-reach…

Selection bias is a persistent, and often hidden, problem in educational research. It is the primary obstacle standing in between increasingly available large education datasets and the ability to make valid causal inferences to inform policymaking, research, and practice (Stuart, 2010). This article provides an accessible discussion on the…

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…

Internationally, efforts are being made for educational practice to be research-informed on the grounds that schoolteachers will implement what research shows will "work". However, teachers do not necessarily accept research findings; sometimes they contest them. This article considers teachers' contestation in two empirical studies,…

This article offers a rationale for the contributions of qualitative research to evidence-based practice in special education. In it, I make the argument that qualitative research encompasses the ability to study significant problems of practice, engage with practitioners in the conduct of research studies, learn and change processes during a…

Recent years have shown a rise in the application of serious games used by organizations to help trainees learn and practice job related skills (Muntean, 2011). Some sources have projected a continued growth in the development and application of video games for novel purposes (Sanders, 2015). Despite the increasing use of video games for workplace…

This project was a qualitative longitudinal research study into cultural and structural change in an English secondary school. The schools' consistent underperformance led to its conversion to "academy" status as part of a development under the Labour administration of 1997-2010. The Labour policy for academization was designed, first,…

To improve Community of Inquiry research, a group of researchers created the Community of Inquiry Questionnaire (CoIQ). While the development of the CoIQ is a step in the right direction, this instrument does not align as well as it could with previous research on each of the individual "presences" (i.e., cognitive presence, teaching…

In Australia, education think tanks have become increasingly influential in policy circles through "reports" to government, and in public debate through the mainstream media. Invariably think-tanks draw on educational research to lend authority and legitimacy to their work. This is desirable if the research deepens understandings about…