Efforts to identify and support credible causal claims have received intense interest in the research community, particularly over the past few decades. In this paper, we focus on the use of statistical procedures designed to support causal claims for a treatment or intervention when the response variable of interest is dichotomous. We identify…

The primary question regarding prescriptive appropriateness is a difficult one to answer for the qualitative researcher. While there are certainly qualitative researchers who have offered prescriptive protocols to better define and describe the terrain of qualitative research design and there are qualitative researchers who offer research…

A prescriptive statement is a recommendation that, if a course of action is taken, then a desirable outcome will likely occur. For example, in reading research recommending that teachers apply an intervention targeted at a specific reading skill to improve children's reading performance is a prescriptive statement. In our view, these statements…

The central role of the propensity score analysis (PSA) in observational studies is for causal inference; as such, PSA is often used for making causal claims in research articles. However, there are still some issues for researchers to consider when making claims of causality using PSA results. This summary first briefly reviews PSA, followed by…

This article provides a theoretical discussion of the concept 'object' within Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). It also introduces some of the methodological considerations that are raised in the study of the formation and transformation of objects of activity. A research project is described in which a theoretical discussion concerning…

In this paper, I offer advice to new researchers on how to conduct a successful research project in educational psychology. I break the research task into three parts: creating a research question, creating a research methodology, and creating a dissemination plan. The criteria for creating a research question include personal interest,…

The objective of this paper is to review and synthesize two interrelated topics in the adult metacomprehension literature: the bases of metacomprehension judgment and the constraints on metacomprehension accuracy. Our review shows that adult readers base their metacomprehension judgments on different types of information, including experiences…

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach to research on gender differences in science that uses the work on expertise in science as a framework for understanding gender differences. Because gender differences in achievement and participation in the sciences are largest in physics, the focus of this review is on physics. The nature of…

This article explores historical reasoning, an important activity in history learning. Based upon an extensive review of empirical literature on students' thinking and reasoning about history, a theoretical framework of historical reasoning is proposed. The framework consists of six components: asking historical questions, using sources,…

A solid understanding of "inferential statistics" is of major importance for designing and interpreting empirical results in any scientific discipline. However, students are prone to many misconceptions regarding this topic. This article structurally summarizes and describes these misconceptions by presenting a systematic review of publications…

Characterising the relationship between participants' scores on two different questionnaires is a common problem in educational research. The complement of the statistic known as Wilks' lambda measures the amount of variance shared between the scores obtained by the same group of participants on two sets of variables. (1 - lambda) is symmetric, in…

Various strands of research in educational, social and organizational psychology focus on structures of collectively created meaning that emerge in and coordinate activities of groups. Despite expanding, this field still lacks conceptual clarity, enhanced by the multitude of terms used, such as common ground, shared understanding, collective mind,…

The paper opens by characterizing recent discourse about empirical educational research as the "new Babel"-critics, using different theoretical vocabularies and making different deep assumptions about the nature of social life, are failing to communicate with each other. After locating some of the critical positions on a left-right continuum, the…

In the first part of this article, I discuss motivational variables in general, and interest in specific and propose that because of its biological roots, interest is a unique motivational variable. Furthermore, it is suggested that to demonstrate the uniqueness of interest, neuroscientific findings need to be considered. In the second section of…

For decades a substantial body of research on teacher reflection and action has been conducted. This research contains a wealth of information on teachers' thinking about their daily work in classrooms. But what do these studies tell us about the linkage between thought and action in actual teaching? How do they contribute to our understanding, or…