The Life Skills Programme, which is one of the newest programmes in the Kenya Preschool educational system was explored to establish the impact it had on the lives of preschool children in Embu West, Kenya. A primary school that is perceived as having well-disciplined children was purposively selected. The sample consisted of 39 students, 43…

Tiered evidence initiatives are an important federal strategy to incentivize and accelerate the use of rigorous evidence in planning, implementing, and assessing social service investments. The Social Innovation Fund (SIF), a program of the Corporation for National and Community Service, adopted a public-private partnership approach to tiered…

Researchers recognize adaptive teaching as a component of effective instruction. Educators adjust their teaching according to the social, linguistic, cultural, and instructional needs of their students. While there is consensus that effective teachers are adaptive, there is no consensus on the language to describe this phenomenon. Diverse…

The Education Technology Industry Network, a division of the Software & Information Industry Association commissioned Empirical Education Inc. to provide guidelines for research given the accelerated development of cloud-based technology and the important policy changes brought about by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The guidelines…

More than 40% of doctoral students are unable to complete their independent capstone research at the conclusion of their coursework, and of those who do complete the capstone, completion often takes longer than anticipated. In online universities, students are often successful during their structured course work, but become overwhelmed with the…

Scholars from diverse fields and research traditions agree that the conceptual framework is a critically important component of disciplined inquiry. Yet, there is a pronounced lack of shared understanding regarding the definition and functions of conceptual frameworks, which impedes our ability to design effective research and mentor novice…

The notion of didactical engineering has influenced and characterized contemporary research in mathematics education in France to an important extent. In this paper, we address the following from an insider's and an outsider's perspective: (1) the way this notion is theoretically grounded, (2) the kinds of design research practices it has led to…

The fluid and crystallized ("Gf-Gc") intelligence theory has been used extensively to evaluate the influence of cognitive abilities on educational outcomes within cross-sectional and longitudinal research designs. This study evaluated the contribution of fluid and crystallized abilities in the performance of a 1-week instructional…

Citation-based metrics are important in determining careers, so it is unsurprising that recent publications advise prospective authors on how to write highly cited papers. While such publications offer excellent advice on structuring and presenting manuscripts, there are significant downsides, including: restrictions in the topics researched,…

This paper discusses issues of research design and methods in new materialist social inquiry, an approach that is attracting increasing interest across the social sciences as an alternative to either realist or constructionist ontologies. New materialism de-privileges human agency, focusing instead upon how assemblages of the animate and inanimate…

Students with significant intellectual and developmental disabilities deserve access to instruction on academic skills in addition to functional skills. Many teachers, however, report challenges with identifying appropriate evidence-based practices to teach academics to these students. The purpose of this systematic review was to summarize and…

This paper describes instruments designed to use multimedia to study at scale the instructional decisions that mathematics teachers make as well as teachers' recognition of elements of the context of their work that might influence those decision. This methodological contribution shows how evidence of constructs like instructional norm and…

In this issue, we have compiled six original papers, outcomes from the U.S. National Science Foundation (US-NSF)-funded REESE (Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering) 2020 Vision: The Next Generation of STEM Learning Research project. The purpose of 2020 Vision was to re-envision the questions and frameworks guiding STEM…

Two white researchers critique the professional veil of silence they created as they reflected on a qualitative study they performed 12 years earlier. Autoethnography and performance ethnography are utilized to examine the ways in which whiteness can remain unexamined throughout the research process due to the construction of white positional…

Simulation studies are fundamental to psychometric discourse and play a crucial role in operational and academic research. Yet, resources for psychometricians interested in conducting simulations are scarce. This Instructional Topics in Educational Measurement Series (ITEMS) module is meant to address this deficiency by providing a comprehensive…