Emergent technologies present platforms for educational researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and collect rich data to study students' performance, behavior, learning processes, and outcomes in authentic learning environments. As educational research increasingly uses methods and data collection from such platforms, it is…

Recently, inspirational articles on research methodology have been written on the development of the mixed-methods approach. This area of study concerns methodological trends in the construction of research designs. One may ask, whether it is possible to construct a notional piece of investigation, potentially highlighting a research design that…

This study aims to identify the associations between teacher mental health and student mental health. Cross-sectional data were collected from 127,877 students aged 9-20 years and 2,759 teachers across 31 provinces in China. The mental health of students and teachers were assessed by well-being (life satisfaction and positive mental health), and…

Elementary teachers require support through professional learning activities to enhance their climate change literacy and bolster their self-efficacy for teaching climate change. This study explores methods for supporting in-service elementary teachers' self-efficacy in climate change teaching by examining the impact of professional learning…

In this paper I study how school desegregation by race following "Brown v. Board of Education" affected White individuals' racial attitudes and politics in adulthood. I use geocoded nationwide data from the General Social Survey and difference-in-differences to identify causal impacts. Integration significantly reduced White individuals'…

Context is a key concept in developing realist causal explanations but its conceptualisation has received comparatively less attention. We conducted a review to explore how context is conceptualised within realist reviews and evaluations. We purposively selected 40 studies to examine: How is context defined? And how is context operationalised in…

A qualitative empirical study of how higher education actors in Azerbaijan conceptualise excellence in teaching and how they promote it at different levels. The findings provide an original insight into how the concept of excellence is understood in the higher education of Azerbaijan. Intriguingly, there is no definition of teaching excellence nor…

Explaining natural phenomena by determining causal relationships is conducive to understanding scientific concepts. In science education, numerous studies examine students' causal reasoning. Given the importance of core ideas for students' understanding of how and why a phenomenon occurs, the study focused on the relationship between students'…

The capability approach has recently been recognised as a potential explanatory theory in disability research. However, to strengthen its explanatory power, it is argued that it should be grounded in a critical realist research paradigm. While critical realism is increasingly adopted in social inquiry, to date there remains little research that…

In the rapidly changing atmosphere of the global economy, productivity has become a very important concept for long-term economic growth, development, regional and global competitiveness, raising social living standards and increasing the level of welfare for countries. In the 21st century, when scientific knowledge, technology, innovation,…

We provide tools for identification and exploration of data with very large variability having power law tails. Such data describe extreme features of processes such as fire losses, flood, drought, financial gain/loss, hurricanes, population of cities, among others. Prediction and quantification of extreme events are at the forefront of the…

Introduction: This study aimed to estimate the causal effect of face-to-face learning on student performance in anatomy, compared to online learning, by analysing examination marks under a causal structure. Methods: We specified a causal graph to indicate how the mode of learning affected student performance. We sampled purposively to obtain…

Students with mature number sense make sense of numbers and operations, use reasoning to notice patterns, and flexibly select the most effective and efficient problem-solving strategies (McIntosh et al., 1997; Yang, 2005). Despite being highlighted in national standards and policy documents (CCSS, 2010; NCTM, 2000), the association between…

Mediation has played a critical role in developmental theory and research. Yet, developmentalists rarely discuss the methodological challenges of establishing causality in mediation analysis or potential strategies to improve the identification of causal mediation effects. In this article, we discuss the potential outcomes framework from…

Machine learning (ML) methods for causal inference have gained popularity due to their flexibility to predict the outcome model and the propensity score. In this article, we provide a within-group approach for ML-based causal inference methods in order to robustly estimate average treatment effects in multilevel studies when there is cluster-level…