In this paper we discuss the potential for using systematic reviews of research to inform policy in education against the background of severe criticisms of the quality and relevance of individual research studies, most recently by the Commission on the Social Sciences. The potential is set against the reality of conducting systematic reviews of…

Personal interaction between health policy makers and researchers is widely seen as the key to enhancing research use, but there are also increasing demands that policies be based on syntheses of the available evidence. A potential paradox arises in that whilst interaction may result in greater use of the evidence it might also lead to a partial…

Cognitive acceleration programmes, started in the early 1980s, have now been run in many hundreds of schools in many parts of the world. One important feature of these programmes is that their effects have been evaluated by following up participant students for some years after the intervention. This has provided extensive experience in the…

School effectiveness research and school improvement research are central in this article. Based on a study of the literature, the hypothesis is put forward that merging both research traditions might be favourable to fostering the quality of education. A theoretical model is developed for School Improvement in terms of Performance Indicators…

After describing the historical development of performance indicators in higher education and the illustrations that they provide for Goodhart's law, the paper discusses the difference between outcome and process indicators. It is suggested that, as long as the latter refer to underlying processes, and not to those immediately accessible, they can…

This is a preliminary report on an aspect of single-sex education in British secondary schools. It is based on a reanalysis of data on students' performance in mathematics in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in 2001. Students' attitudes to mathematics were also investigated. Girls' achievement within girls' schools was…

This research study was conducted in Trinidad and Tobago to investigate students' responses to a summative assessment of a cross-cultural unit of work. The unit was designed to help students learn Western science by building bridges between their traditional practices and beliefs on selected health-related matters and conventional science…

This paper explains the principles and procedures of second-order theoretical analysis of observation data. The second-order theoretical procedure is illustrated by analysis of the student-teachers seminar on the subject of the Holocaust, focusing on dilemmas of Holocaust survivors. Analysing observational data allows two distinctive method of…

The purpose of this paper is to examine economic significance as a fourth measure of significance. In addition to describing and operationalising the concept of economic significance, a typology of economic significance indices is presented, including an example of how to compute these measures, as well as how to utilise them in applied research.…

Improving the quality of reporting could increase the usefulness of research for readers such as parents, students, practitioners, policy-makers, systematic reviewers and other researchers. This paper first presents an analysis of the reporting of basic information about the aims, context and methods used in a sample of published empirical…

This paper models the likelihood of individuals becoming teachers, to identify the key social and economic determinants of selecting teaching as a career in the UK. E-mail and focus group interviews were used to develop a questionnaire, for surveying a sample of 1845 students and professional trainees from four tertiary institutions in South-west…

In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954), this volume of "Review of Research in Education" looks at education research linked to issues addressed in that decision. In the "Brown" case, the court asserted the central importance of the government's role in education, and reversed…

The 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" decision is significant with respect to African Americans in the principalship for several reasons. First, teachers, principals, and parents were the most important influences in the education of Black children in the pre-"Brown" era of schooling. Thus, discussions about the "Brown" decision and the education…

The goals of this chapter are threefold. The first goal is to examine the scientific attainment of African Americans in the post-"Brown" era. The term scientific attainment is used here to describe more broadly mathematics and scientific achievement as measured in trend studies, academic coursework, and degrees. A second, related goal is to…

In this chapter, the authors outline critical race theory (CRT) as an analytical framework that originated in schools of law to examine and challenge the continuing significance of race and racism in U.S. society. They then describe the CRT framework within the field of education. CRT scholarship offers an explanatory structure that accounts for…