Experience-sampling methods (ESM) enable us to learn about individuals' lives in context by measuring participants' feelings, thoughts, actions, context, and/or activities as they go about their daily lives. By capturing experience, affect, and action "in the moment" and with repeated measures, ESM approaches allow researchers…

The theory and tools of "improvement science" have produced performance improvements in many organizational sectors. This essay describes improvement science and explores its potential and challenges within education. Potential contributions include attention to the knowledge-building and motivational systems within schools, strategies…

More than three decades of mentoring research has yet to converge on a unifying definition of mentoring; this is unsurprising given the diversity of relationships classified as mentoring. This article advances beyond a definition toward a common framework for specifying mentoring models. Sixteen design elements were identified from the literature…

This article investigates the extent to which researchers are currently engaged in a shared research program that offers systematic evidence of the classroom impact of organized venues (preservice as well as inservice) for teacher professional learning. The article stems from concern about policies rooted in suspicion that teacher education is…

This review provides a critical appraisal of the measurement of students' social class and socioeconomic status (SES) in the context of widening higher education participation. Most assessments of social class and SES in higher education have focused on objective measurements based on the income, occupation, and education of students'…

Despite increased attention to methodological rigor in education research, the field has focused heavily on experimental design and not on the merit of replicating important results. The present study analyzed the complete publication history of the current top 100 education journals ranked by 5-year impact factor and found that only 0.13% of…

Experimental and quasi-experimental designs are used in educational research to establish causality and develop effective practices. These research designs rely on a counterfactual model that, in simple form, calls for a comparison between a treatment group and a control group. Developers of educational practices often assume that the population…

The author of this commentary argues that physical scientists are attempting to advance knowledge in the so-called hard sciences, whereas education researchers are laboring to increase knowledge and understanding in an "extremely hard" but softer domain. Drawing on the work of Popper and Dewey, this commentary highlights the relative…

In this commentary, the author argues that there is a considerable degree of similarity between research in the hard sciences and education and that this provides a useful lens for thinking about what constitutes "rigorous" and "scientific" education research. He suggests that the fundamental property of hard science research…

The authors argue for a reconceptualization of rigor that requires sustained, direct, and systematic documentation of what takes place inside programs to document how students and teachers change and adapt interventions in interactions with each other in relation to their dynamic local contexts. Building on promising new programs at the Institute…

The theoretical framework of intersectionality shows much promise in exploring how multiple social identities and their relationships with interlocking systems of power influence educational equity, particularly for historically underserved groups in education. Yet, social scientists have critiqued this framework for not adequately specifying how…

Access to the nation's most selective colleges remains starkly unequal, with students in the lowest income quartile constituting less than 4% of enrollment. A popular explanation for this phenomenon is that low-income students "undermatch" by attending less selective colleges when their credentials predict admission to more highly…

Impact evaluation plays a critical role in determining whether federally funded research programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are wise investments. This paper develops quantitative methods for program evaluation and applies this approach to a flagship National Science Foundation-funded education research program, Research…

This article and my career as an educational researcher are grounded in two fundamental assumptions: (a) that research and practice can and should live in productive synergy, with each enhancing the other, and (b) that research focused on teaching and learning in a particular discipline can, if carefully framed, yield insights that have…

This article proposes an analytical consideration for social capital research in education by exploring a pragmatic combination of social network analysis (SNA) and symbolic interactionism (SI) as a research method. The article first delineates the theoretical linkages of social capital theory with SNA and SI. The article then discusses how SNA…