Institutional researchers can be confronted with ethical quandaries. Pressures from their institutions can conflict with professional standards and general ethical requirements. Analyses that appear to be neutral can conceal hidden assumptions that are unintentionally harmful to those individuals whom institutions have a responsibility to protect.…

The increasing popularity of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) in social research brings an increasing criticism about its validity, robustness and, more recently, its lack of expressive features. Recently, the novel arts-based research approach called body-mapping was recognized as enhancing social science research in creative and…

Paradigmatic pluralism in educational technology is a largely unaddressed reality, and we have heretofore not provided guidance to professionals on how to navigate it. Pushing back against mainstream views of scientific progress (e.g., linear, progressive), we must recognize the processes by which paradigms are born, adopted, and rejected and that…

In institution research, surveys of students or faculty can be a helpful tool to gather data. Surveying a sample of students or faculty and computing weights to be able to make inferences to your student or faculty population are important. In this chapter, we introduce the connected topics of sampling and weighting. We begin with a discussion on…

Learning analytics (LA) promises understanding and optimization of learning and learning environments. To enable richer insights regarding questions related to learning and education, LA solutions should be able to integrate data coming from many different data sources, which may be stored in different formats and have varying levels of structure.…

Purpose: Insight has grown that for an organization to learn and change successfully, forgetting and unlearning are required. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the relevant existing body of empirical research on forgetting and unlearning, to encourage research using a greater variety of methods and to contribute to a more complementary…

This article focuses on the scholarly literature of the last 30 years on university governance in Canada. After describing the research methods that I used to compile that body of literature and to analyze its individual components, I reconstruct the general approaches, or angles, from which scholars address that topic. A discussion of several…

The overarching purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to the use of rigorous single-case research designs (SCRDs) in special education and related fields. Authors first discuss basic design types and research questions that can be answered with SCRDs, examine threats to internal validity and potential ways to control for and detect…

Course: Qualitative Research Methods. Objectives: To provide students with an experiential understanding of the six steps to conducting a thematic analysis: (1) gaining familiarity with the data, (2) creating coding categories or subcategories, (3) generating themes, (4) reviewing themes, (5) labeling themes, and (6) identifying exemplars. To help…

Purpose: This article presents a basic exploration of Bayesian inference to inform researchers unfamiliar to this type of analysis of the many advantages this readily available approach provides. Method: First, we demonstrate the development of Bayes' theorem, the cornerstone of Bayesian statistics, into an iterative process of updating priors.…

Despite increasing use of implementation frameworks, research evidence indicates that the uptake of evidence-based practice is minimally realised. Reasons for the lack of up-take may be: 1) lack of fit between evidence-based interventions and local contexts; 2) lack of knowledge of how and when to adapt an evidence-based intervention to promote…

The author comments on Noel Entwistle's paper "Contributions of Educational Psychology to Understanding Student Learning: What Has Been Discovered -- What More Could Be Done?" He begins the article by expressing his delight because he feels Entwistle's work has been a beacon in the understanding of student learning and his contributions…

Consent in the definition of adult education is only apparent and circumscribed. Substantial differences survive, fueled by various national ideologies, cultures and policies. The plurality of angles determines a multiplicity of research approaches. Transformative research is the typical model of adult education research and is analysed in its…

Replication has long been a cornerstone for establishing trustworthy scientific results, but there remains considerable disagreement about what constitutes as a replication, how results from these studies should be interpreted, and whether direct replication of results is even possible. This article addresses these concerns by presenting the…

Since 2013, the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education has covered the significant developments in the field of comparative and international education. This year's edition begins with a collection of reflective essays about comparative education trends and directions written by both professional and scholarly leaders in the…