There has been considerable discussion in recent years about the role in educational research of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and systematic reviews (SR). Advocacy of these methods arose partly as a result of the spread of the notion of evidence-based practice from medicine into other fields, and of the rise of the "new public…

Several writers have appealed to the literature on communities of practice as a way of thinking about the nature of educational research. In this paper, I look at the benefits and dangers of doing this. There seem to be two main sorts of lesson that have been drawn from this literature, one about research as an activity in its own right, the other…