People who can provide or deny access to research participants are known as 'gatekeepers'. In my 30 years as a researcher, I have learned that gatekeepers have a variety of motivations and strategies to block (or facilitate) research. This case describes several research projects where gatekeepers have played a pivotal role, and what I have…

Several points of contrast are highlighted between design-based research (DBR) as often practiced within the learning sciences and design partnerships inspired by cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). It is argued that learning scientists can improve their work by learning from CHAT-inspired DBR in 4 particular ways: (a) by recognizing the…

Purpose: Nonexperimental research, defined as any kind of quantitative or qualitative research that is not an experiment, is the predominate kind of research design used in the social sciences. How to unambiguously and correctly present the results of nonexperimental research, however, remains decidedly unclear and possibly detrimental to applied…

An effective education system depends upon attracting college students into the teaching profession, but most of the research on what motivates individuals to pursue teaching merely surveys individuals who have already entered a teacher education program. This study employs an experimental design to test the effects of exposure to randomly…

Single case studies can provide vital contributions to theory-testing in social science studies. Particularly, by applying the process-tracing method, case studies can test theoretical frameworks through a rigorous research design that ensures substantial empirical leverage. While most scholarly contributions on process-tracing focus on either…

This study examines the effect of choosing versus receiving feedback on the learning performance of n = 98 post-secondary students from California on a digital poster design task. The study employs a yoked experimental design where college students are randomly assigned to play a choice-based assessment game, Posterlet, in one of two conditions,…

Randomized control trials are considered the gold standard for conducting research and estimating causal effects; however, educational research rarely lends itself to experimental design and true randomization. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in finding new approaches to estimate causal effects in nonrandomized studies in…

In my role as teacher or researcher, I was asked to evaluate the provision of an alternative curriculum for students who were at risk of exclusion at our school. Multiple perspectives needed to be considered including the voices of the staff and students. The use of a mixed-methods convergent design allowed the selection and combination of both…

The main objective of this text is to share the process of conducting a qualitative case study that analyzed the construction of a novice school psychologist's professional identity during her first year of work in a school's guidance department. This text aims to tell "the real story behind the research"; therefore, the description of…

The aim of this study was to examine effectiveness of applying learning together (LT) method at different intervals on improvement of middle school students' academic success and science process skills. The sample of study consisted of 117 sixth and seventh grade students in two public middle schools. In this study, the "Solomon Experimental…

Respondent incentives are widely used to increase response rates, but their effect on nonresponse bias has not been researched as much. To contribute to the research, we analyze an incentive experiment embedded within the third wave of the German household panel survey "Panel Labor Market and Social Security" conducted by the German…

Social skills interventions designed to increase pro-social interactions for individuals with autism spectrum disorders are critical, but the relative effectiveness of these interventions is not well understood. More than 250 single-case design studies in 113 articles were reviewed and described in terms of participants, settings, arrangements,…

To plan group-randomized trials where treatment conditions are assigned to schools, researchers need design parameters that provide information about between-school differences in outcomes as well as the amount of variance that can be explained by covariates at the student (L1) and school (L2) levels. Most previous research has offered these…

In areas of emerging research, such as supporting teachers' classroom management, replication of research is critical to ensuring that recommendations for the field are based on sound science and appropriate for the contexts to which they are being applied. This article describes a replication of research on efficient professional development…

The present study aimed at conducting content analysis on dissertations carried out so far in the field of Educational Technology in Turkey. A total of 137 dissertations were examined to determine the key words, academic discipline, research areas, theoretical frameworks, research designs and models, statistical analyses, data collection tools,…