Pregnancy is a frequently applied exclusion criteria for many forms of research. Common justifications for this exclusion include the potential for teratogenicity, as well as the potential for physiologic changes in pregnancy to impact the research itself. The systematic exclusion of pregnant persons from clinical studies has created a significant…

Since the learning disability (LD) population comprises the largest group receiving special education services, there is a need for research to examine the self-concept of this population at a global level. This systematic literature review synthesized 20 years of quantitative research (k = 16) about the self-concept of students with LD. The…

This study explored expertise in searching for online information on a contentious historical and political question. Fact checkers, historians, and college students thought aloud while conducting online research on the question, "Did Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, support euthanasia?" Analyses of screen recordings…

Given the importance of education and the growing public demand for improving education quality under tight budget constraints, there has been an emerging movement to call for research-informed decisions in educational resource allocation. Despite the abundance of rigorous studies on the effectiveness, cost, and implementation of educational…

The paper introduces a concept of a "negotiated space" to describe university researchers' attempts to balance pragmatically, continually and dynamically over time, their own agency and autonomy in the selection of research topics and pursuit of scientific research to filter out the explicit steering and tacit signals of external…

Existing data sets can be an efficient, powerful, and readily available resource for addressing questions about developmental science. Many of the available databases contain hundreds of variables of interest to developmental psychologists, track participants longitudinally, and have representative samples. In this article, the authors discuss the…

Researchers may be interested in examining the impact of programs that prepare youth and adults for successful careers but unable to implement experimental designs with true randomization of participants. As a result, these studies can be compromised by underlying factors that impact group selection and thus lead to potentially biased results.…

This paper argues for the importance of ethnography in the conduct of educational research and the ways in which it can threaten, in a good sense, the certainties and dominance of performativity. The paper uses the poetry of Emily Dickinson to signal the importance of indirection in the conduct of ethnographic work and, more specifically, the ways…

In this paper the authors present a new method for sample selection for scale-up experiments. This method uses propensity score matching methods to create a sample that is similar in composition to a well-defined generalization population. The method they present is flexible and practical in the sense that it identifies units to be targeted for…

It is well documented that studies reporting statistically significant results are more likely to be published than are studies reporting nonsignificant results--a phenomenon called "publication bias". Publication bias in meta-analytic reviews should be identified and reduced when possible. Ferguson and Brannick (2012) argued that the inclusion of…

The purpose of this paper is threefold. The first is to test whether the pretest plays a greater role in bias reduction than any other single covariate, which the authors predict it will. The second is to examine the marginal improvement in bias reduction offered by having two pretest measurement waves. The authors predict that there will be some…

Published just over a half century ago, "Schedules of Reinforcement" (SOR) (Ferster & Skinner, 1957) marked the seminal empirical contribution of the book's second author and ushered in an era of research on behavior-environment relationships. This article traces the origins of both the methods and the data presented in SOR, and its legacy within…

Starting by a brief introduction of literature method, this paper raises the question of how to choose representative research literatures. For this question, Professor Hongcai Wang points out the root of this problem and the strategies to resolve it and provides the ways to choose representative literatures. Through analyzing and summarizing,…

In the May 2010 issue of "Psychological Bulletin," R. E. McGrath, M. Mitchell, B. H. Kim, and L. Hough published an article entitled "Evidence for Response Bias as a Source of Error Variance in Applied Assessment" (pp. 450-470). They argued that response bias indicators used in a variety of settings typically have insufficient data to support such…

This paper examines the decisions and motivations of graduate students in cultural anthropology when defining the field sites and topics of their final projects. The decisions among students at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia are contrasted with those at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States. A review of recent final projects…