Abstract
We are honored to lead the editorial team for Educational Researcher, a journal highly ranked for impact factor. Our team believes deeply that high-quality research is fundamental to developing policy and improving practice. Our collective vision represents a commitment to the values of excellence in inquiry, independence in analysis, and strategic innovation in research means and dissemination. It includes a commitment to rethinking what constitutes knowledge and its production and transmission, what constitutes expertise and its validation, and what constitutes rigor and quality. These considerations are central for any community of scholars, and certainly for scholars in education.
Educational Researcher is the signature journal of the largest professional educational research association. The central place that education holds in the aspirations of communities and nations has never been so strong. Research is fundamental to achieving those aspirations, and there is a growing appetite for research and its understandings among policy makers and the general public. Educational Researcher currently plays a central role in providing high-quality research to scholars and to larger publics. It has the potential to broaden its reach even more—to advance the breadth of educational interests and research excellence; ethnic, cultural, and geographic diversity; and commitment to promoting research that informs and improves policy and practice within a global context.
The contributions of the former editorial team, led by Steven R. Yussen, were many and outstanding. Their work gives us an advantage as we begin our editorship. We appreciate their vigilance in ensuring that the journal reflects the range of topics in the field and the high quality that is expected. We are also appreciative of earlier teams who were instrumental in transforming the journal’s content, and of the AERA and SAGE staff, in particular, Felice Levine, AERA executive director; Todd Reitzel, AERA director of publications; and Alana Schwartz, AERA publications assistant.
Our team of associate editors was carefully selected to draw upon excellence in individual research, depth and breadth of research experience, range of cultural backgrounds, and diversity of methodological and disciplinary competencies and perspectives. Consistent with the practice of the previous editorial team, we will assign an action editor (i.e., editor or associate editor) to read each submitted manuscript based on expertise and workload, not journal section. As in the past, we will reserve the right to decline manuscripts on the basis of an initial editorial screening rather than a full review if, in the view of at least two of us, the proposed article clearly falls outside the purposes of the journal or falls significantly short of expectations of quality.
We are prepared to continue to build the journal and advance it as the most prominent source of high-quality, timely, and accessible research across all fields of education. The quality of the research in ER and the affiliation of the journal with AERA enhance the credibility and influence of both the journal and the association. The relationship will remain strong and generative. Our vision encompasses creating opportunities for greater interchange between and among researchers, practitioners, and policy makers about both the problems in the field and the possibilities for change. We encourage manuscripts with strong causal implications for policy and practice that cut across multiple theoretical and methodological models, that focus on the broad range of populations in educational institutions and communities, and that take seriously the uses and translations of research across different domains of scholarship and practice.
A strong focus of the team is on the policy deliberation process and the role of research in informing the process. Our collective interest is grounded in and propelled by a determination to link the findings, understandings, and interrogations of the research community with the policy deliberation process. It is well known that policy is not driven primarily by research, which is as frequently used for ammunition as for information. However, we also know that, at times and in various ways, policy making is influenced powerfully and consequentially by research. The high regard in which ER is held, as substantiated by the high impact factor coupled with the frequency of the journal production schedule (nine times per year), provides a unique and valuable opportunity to take advantage of policy deliberation windows. It allows ER to publish and disseminate timely, topical, and high-quality research, positioning the journal, the association, and the authors to influence policy. However, the primary readership of the journal will continue to be educational researchers. The journal must continue to be without peer in rigor, topic reach, and relevance for researchers across the breadth of disciplines critical to education. To these other objectives, however, can be added a more intentional eye to policy relevance and to windows of policy opportunity. When submitting, we encourage authors to clarify and sharpen the implications in their manuscripts for policy and practice.
To increase the breadth of focus, we will build upon the existing areas of research for which ER is known while probing newer and developing areas. Further development might include investigations across the demarcations of formal and informal education and across institutional boundaries such as higher education and early childhood education; the cultivation of human and social capital and cultural and community-legitimized education; learning and teaching across the life-course; and the equitable allocation of resources across communities and children and between state actors and schools. A balance would be required between policy-relevant or topical issues—such as school turnaround, data infrastructure, evaluation of teacher practice, teacher-student effects, and teacher preparation—and broader inquiry into more fundamental understandings of subjects such as cognition and its processes and measurement, instruction and its delivery, institutional forms of educational opportunity, and knowledge production.
We encourage manuscripts from various genres of research and scholarship that address policy areas related to education that are likely to be debated over the next four years. We aim to stay alert to domestic and international policy streams and policy initiatives emanating from governmental agencies, think tanks, and private foundations. Other possible areas are special education, counseling and school psychology, and broad aspects of human development. Contributions are encouraged in the complex areas of globalization, knowledge production, digital technologies, and the production of cultural identities across global and demographic webs. The team is also intrigued by new understandings emerging from the rapidly evolving study of human performance in real settings, and by new findings in the neurological sciences and their implications for cognitive processes and instructional practice.
We will be deliberate in drawing out new understandings from culturally diverse and indigenous communities, with an eye for the role of policy in sharpening or suppressing development of cultural identities, instructional differentiation, and educational progress of children from under-resourced locales. In this work, we will encourage submissions that examine the role of institutional and structural barriers to student engagement and achievement and to successful teaching and schooling, particularly as these are located in perennial questions related to race, class, gender, and learning differences.
In addition, a journal that appears nine times a year creates a number of opportunities and challenges. We believe that it is critical that the journal continue to be topical and responsive without compromising quality or impact, and we encourage authors to take advantage of the variety of formats, for research articles (“Feature Articles,” “Reviews/Essays,” “Briefs,” Technical Comments”) and commentaries (“Policy Forum,” “Letters,” “Books et al.”). Our editorial team will focus on three strategies: one, providing editorial introductions that discuss the broader contexts and implications of the research for policy and practice; two, soliciting synthetic overviews of topical and/or emerging issues, particularly when there has been public discussion and perhaps confusion about what research can tell us; and, three, making use of linkages, digital and other, to well-reviewed sources or resources that might enhance understanding or add perspectives beyond those presented in the articles.
Finally, our editorial team takes seriously the educative and socializing function of the signature journal of the association. The team will work to develop and refine effective approaches to implementing traditional and emerging notions of quality and rigor. In conjunction with existing committees and units within the association, the team will affirmatively identify opportunities to mentor graduate students and emerging scholars and make editorial processes more transparent to developing researchers and to members of indigenous and underrepresented communities.
We are motivated by the opportunity to build upon the strong reputation of ER as a source of cutting-edge research in the field and as an impetus for the conduct of research that draws from multiple disciplines, methodologies, theoretical approaches, and epistemologies. Educational Researcher carries with it the imprimatur of AERA, a legacy of articles from renowned scholars, and a continuing promise of substantial impact on the field of education and the profession of education research. We look forward to receiving your manuscripts. You have our assurances that we will take the responsibility seriously and with the expectation that ER will continue to be a leading publication among all journals in our field.