Replies to several authors who critiqued an article on scientific culture and educational research, reiterating the original article's core argument that harnessing the epistemological and methodological diversity of the field to advance its common goals is difficult but essential work. Encourages further debate on the issues addressed in the…

Agrees with Feuer, Towne, and Shavelson's article about scientific culture and educational research and with the National Research Council Report upon which it was based, but contends that science does not mean the same thing to everyone, nor have distinctions between educational science and other sciences been well made in either report. Examines…

Asserts that both the Feuer, Towne, and Shavelson article on scientific culture and educational research and the recent National Research Council (NRC) report must be understood in the context of current federal discourse focused on experimentally derived causal explanations of educational program effectiveness. Notes that the NRC report risks…

Addresses two issues from Feuer, Towne, and Shavelson's article, which examined scientific culture and educational research. Agrees that legislative mandates that give preference particular methodological approaches would be ill-informed and misdirected, recommending a mandate for rigorous peer review of federally funded work combined with funding…

In response to Howe (2009), the author argues that educational research needs multiple thoughtful perspectives. The author's standpoint is that of a mixed methods research methodologist. Mixed methods research provides an antidualistic and syncretic philosophy and set of approaches or possibilities for merging insights from diverse perspectives;…

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…

This commentary was designed to accompany a series of articles in "Educational Researcher," vol. 35, no. 1, a theme issue entitled "Moving Beyond "Gratz" and "Grutter"--The Next Generation of Research." The author discusses the role of education research in civil rights litigation, drawing on historical…

In this article, the author argues that there is minimal scientific support for the pedagogical approaches promoted for low-income students in the federal Reading First initiative. In combination with high-stakes testing, the interpretation of the construct "systematic phonics instruction" in Reading First has resulted in highly…

In this article, the authors examine the interconnections among education researchers' misconceptions about the quality of the education research literature. Specifically, the authors catalog the sequence of events that, when taken together with a series of contradictory graphs presented by influential scholars in prominent settings, may have…

An early version of this article, discussing curricular interventions in mathematics, was written for the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC). The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which funds WWC, instructed WWC not to publish it. An expanded version, written at WWC's invitation for a special issue of an independent electronic journal and a book…

The National Research Council report, "Scientific Research in Education," claims to present an inclusive view of sciences in responding to federal attempts to legislate educational research. This article asserts that it narrowly defines science as positivism and methodology as quantitative, rejecting postmodernism and omitting other theories. Uses…

Greenhow, Robelia, and Hughes (2009) argue that Web 2.0 media are well suited to enhancing the education research community's purpose of generating and sharing knowledge. The author of this comment article first articulates how a research infrastructure with capabilities for communal bookmarking, photo and video sharing, social networking, wikis,…

Random samples of 50 articles each from the education and health-sciences literature are used to compare uses of quantitative evidence. Study designs and approaches in these fields are similar; thus no support is provided for the idea that educational research is less rigorous than that of the health sciences. (SLD)