Motivation and engagement play a crucial role in literacy development and achievement. However, the construct of reading engagement has become blurred and ambiguous, both in research and in discussions of practice. In order to guide future research and to extend our existing understanding of reading engagement into classroom practice, this study…

Theories of gender and race in mathematics education predominately remain unchanged in recent years (Damarin, 2008; Parks & Schmeichel, 2012), with feminism not always seen as relevant to mathematics education. New theories and methodologies related to gender create possibilities to reinvigorate gender research in mathematics education and…

As the engineering education research (EER) field is yet to fully mature, there are few formally established pathways to EER. Consequently, most researchers transition to EER after completing technical engineering qualifications. Reconciling this training with the distinctly different expectations of educational research creates unique challenges…

When conceived of as both a research strategy and mode to present findings, vignettes can be combined with various qualitative methodologies in higher education research. Rather than being a discipline unto itself, higher education research is best understood as a multi and cross-disciplinary field of study that, we contend, is made richer by its…

This article offers two novel tools for teaching political science methodology and research design. The first is a comprehensive framework for helping students conceptualize a research project in political science. The second is a reformulation of the dominant conceptualization of process-tracing tests. Building on Collier's use of Sherlock Holmes…

Issues of school choice regularly appear in popular discourse related to resources, equity, and freedom in education. Although school choice policies and initiatives promote a vision of additional schooling options for all students, the predominant target of choice advocates and researchers has been densely populated, urban cores in the United…

Advent of internet has a revolutionary impact on every sector of economy and so is with the education sector, which has witnessed the evolution of online education through scalable educational technology, namely, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The purpose of this paper is to summarize the pool of available knowledge related to MOOCs in the…

Sexual maturation is one method by which researchers account for developmental timing during growth. In a longitudinal motor performance study (MPS), mothers reported their own recalled age at menarche and their daughters.' Approximately twenty years later, a sample of those daughters provided their recalled age at menarche. Study purposes were to…

Participatory research--the inclusion in research of members of a group being studied--is based on the idea that advanced degrees are not a requirement for conducting research, and that the people closest to a problem have knowledge that can lead to better, more accurate results. MDRC researchers worked with a group of youth fellows in Learn and…

Survey methodology is the dominant approach among universities in the United States for reporting employment outcomes for recent graduates. However, past studies have shown that survey methodology may yield upwardly biased results, which can result in overreporting of employment rates and salary outcomes. This case study describes the development…

With research as a guide, designing CTE programs that promote equity and help close the opportunity gap is achievable. This is the fifth in a series of six practitioner training modules developed as part of the Career & Technical Education (CTE) Research Network Lead. Designed for CTE practitioners and state agency staff, these modules are…

In educational contexts, students often self-select into specific interventions (e.g., courses, majors, extracurricular programming). When students self-select into an intervention, systematic group differences may impact the validity of inferences made regarding the effect of the intervention. Propensity score methods are commonly used to reduce…

This dissertation is composed of projects on three aspects of gathering and learning from data in the social sciences: drawing representative samples, taking valid measurement, and making warranted inductive inferences. Chapter one studies the challenge of drawing representative human samples. It is well documented that most samples used by…

This dissertation is based on auto-criticism, a new qualitative inquiry that combines educational criticism and arts-based research. It focuses on my own experiences as an aspiring educator who struggles with stuttering and public speaking anxiety. The study aims to describe, interpret, evaluate, and thematize my experiences of dealing with public…

Geospatial technologies have revolutionised the field of hazard research as well as geography field-courses, providing powerful tools to analyse and visualise geospatial data for decision-making purposes. This paper presents a case study of Paper2GIS, an application for field data collection tested during an international field course in…