Conventional approaches to causation in the social sciences draw on approaches in the Philosophy of Science in which a causal force acts on cases and generates change in the form of events. This relies on just one of the Aristotelian conceptions of cause - efficient cause - what brings the effect in to being. We should also pay attention to Final…

Based on three vignettes taken from interviews with friends who were members of a social-ecological transition initiative of which I was both an active participant and a researcher, this paper explores ethnography in friendship. Breaking with the methodological proposals known as friendship as method, this text proposes to reflect on the ways…

Social scientists have frequently sought to understand the distinct effects of age, period, and cohort, but disaggregation of the three dimensions is difficult because cohort = period - age. We argue that this technical difficulty reflects a disconnection between how the cohort effect is conceptualized and how it is modeled in the traditional…

In the complex world of educational policy, causal inferences will be debated. As we review non-experimental designs in educational policy, we focus on how to clarify and focus the terms of debate. We begin by presenting the potential outcomes/counterfactual framework and then describe approximations to the counterfactual generated from the…

The research-practice divide between social scientists and educators is a persistent problem for the accurate communication and translation of social scientific research into pedagogical practice. This paper uses mindset theory as a case study, arguing that the social scientific theories transcending the research-practice divide tend to be those…

This article examines a longstanding university-sponsored summer internship program for doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Michigan's Rackham Graduate School. Four years of student reflection data suggest that an internship is an enriching experiential learning opportunity that contributes to both…

Pedagogies for movement learning have been affected by a gap between natural science and social science. The gap has meant that pedagogy tend to focus relatively more on either product, material context, and normative ways of moving, or process, learners, social context, and non-normative ways of moving. Here, I suggest that philosopher and…

In analyzing the disseminated call, the commentary suggests the need for a consciousness consistent with a quote from Maya Angelou concerning identity. It is applied--in this case--to the situation of social science and specifically developmental science vis-à-vis published scholarship pertaining to communities of color. Questioned is the field's…

Debates surrounding the use of data science in educational AI are frequently rather entrenched, revolving around commercial models and talk of teacher replacement. This article explores the potential for digital textual analysis within humanities and social science education, advocating for a sociologically-driven approach that complements, rather…

Despite calls to increase the focus on explainability and interpretability in EDM and, in particular, student success prediction, so that it becomes useful for personalized intervention systems, only few efforts have been undertaken in that direction so far. In this paper, we argue that this is mainly due to the limitations of current Explainable…

This paper examines Jean Floud's assessment of the work of Karl Mannheim, against the background of the development of British sociology of education in the 1940s and 50s. She compared his approach with that of Durkheim, concluding that both adopted a focus on social statics rather than dynamics, this reflecting their conservative political…

Scholarship on multimethod case selection in the social sciences has developed rapidly in recent years, but many possibilities remain unexplored. This essay introduces an attractive and advantageous new alternative, involving the selection of extreme cases on the treatment variable, net of the statistical influence of the set of known control…

How do researchers of cognitive development work to make sure that our field evolves so that our contribution to humanity is emancipatory? We can take inspiration from researchers near and far. Inspiration may be found in other areas of psychological research (social, cultural, etc.) and other social sciences (public health, sociology, etc.).…

Outside of a specialist literature, the study of violence occupies a marginal position within comparative and international education scholarship. A key contributing factor is the absence of a holistic conceptual framework that can capture the nature, extent and causes of violence in education. The article proposes such a framework, by updating…

This paper reflects critically upon how the 'mobilities turn' in the social sciences, and its subsequent contribution towards 'policy mobilities', offers theoretical and methodological resources that can be usefully harnessed in education policy sociology. Just as there are new ways in which policy is being made and moved, there are equally new…