Abstract
In the summer of 1994, Murray and Raths issued their inaugural call for manuscripts as the incoming editors of the Review of Educational Research (RER), the American Educational Research Association’s premier review journal. In so doing, they offered a beautifully crafted analogy regarding the nature and purpose of the review article. In short, they suggested that the scholarly literature forms the brick and mortar of the walls of education research, while the purpose of the review article is to study or investigate the very nature and composition of the wall. Just 5 years later, Franklin (1999) challenged such a view by proposing that the review article serves an even more substantive role—Franklin argued that the authors of review articles serve as masons of the architecture of our field. The discursive practices and epistemic frames invoked in reviews of literature shape a view or vision of the state of a field of research. Thus, reviews of research literature, particularly those published in prestigious, highly ranked outlets like RER, serve as “venues where fields of inquiry are constituted, reproduced, and over time changed” (p. 347).
As an editorial team, we embrace both of the aforementioned views on the role of reviews of research. That is, we agree that review articles represent efforts to look deeper into the edifice of education research to the bricks and mortar with which that structure is built. Simultaneously, we contend that through these examinations authors are necessarily composing a view of the field that has the potential to shape the future of research and practice. In light of these complementary and influential roles, we feel that the review article must be rigorously held to the highest conceptual and methodological standards with an eye toward openness and transparency. At the same time, those rigorous standards must allow for the epistemic and intellectual diversity that is at the heart of critical analysis. Our interest in serving as editors of RER is in direct response to these contentions. In short, building on the successes of the editors who have preceded us, we are committed to cultivating RER as a central source of conceptually rich, methodologically rigorous, and intellectually provocative reviews of literature that will shape the future of education research and practice in meaningful ways.
Scope and Strengths
Since its inception in 1931, RER has stood as a prestigious journal within the field of education, publishing critically important reviews of research focused on educational constructs, processes, and outcomes. In that capacity, the work published within RER has met demanding analytical standards, advanced empirically driven arguments, and laid the foundation for building sound educational theory with implications for practice. In perusing the numerous volumes of RER, particularly those of the past decade, and in reflecting on our editorial and reviewer experiences with this and related journals, three key strengths emerged—strengths that we will seek to maintain as we take the helm of RER. First, the journal has a strong commitment to syntheses pertaining to the various aspects of educational practice, including teaching and learning, individual student differences (e.g., executive function), and the roles of social, cultural, and contextual factors. Moreover, articles published in the journal represent varied review methodologies such as meta-analytic, best-evidence, or systematic reviews that draw on a range of data sources, including empirical articles, secondary databases, and historical and political archives. Second, RER enjoys a growing international presence both in authorship and in readership. No doubt such international presence is key to RER’s continued success as education research becomes increasingly global. Third, the timeliness and efficiency of the outgoing editor and board are praiseworthy and to be emulated. Although many more strengths could be mentioned, we feel that these three strengths have laid a strong foundation for future editorial teams. As the incoming editorial team of RER, we will endeavor to build on those strengths by continuing to publish thoughtful and provocative, as well as conceptually and methodologically sound, review articles in a timely and efficient manner.
Editorial Focus
Our editorial focus for the coming years will extend the architectural metaphors forwarded by Murray and Raths (1994) and Franklin (1999). Rather than building walls, however, we seek to build roads and bridges through the solicitation of review manuscripts whose goal is to provide insights on the critical questions and multidimensional problems that face education. In our inaugural editorial year, we seek to increase the submission of reviews of research pertaining to education innovations and interventions, particularly those that harness interdisciplinary perspectives of relevance to education. We also want to implement new ways to chronicle advancements across domains of inquiry (e.g., curriculum, learning, policy, finance, or administration), thereby bridging past and present. Finally, we want RER to become an invaluable conduit of cutting-edge and evidence-based information for policymakers and change agents tasked with plotting the future direction of education.
Innovation and Intervention
Previous editors of the journal have been immensely successful in publishing reviews on a wide array of topics or issues of importance to the educational community. Moreover, such reviews have been well situated within particular theoretical, social, cultural, contextual, or policy perspectives. We seek to maintain the diversity of submissions while encouraging a critical-analytic eye toward education innovation and intervention. Although there will always be a place in the journal for reviews that take on a specific topic (e.g., school funding, assessment practices, or learner motivation), the challenges facing 21st-century learners and teachers call for something more. These challenges call for the interrogation of the education research literature to address timely and complex questions of real significance to stakeholders in hopes of identifying salient factors or data-based trends that can serve as the platform for change. This is what we are calling “innovation.” There is also a need to interrogate the literature in terms of what has already been done to address a pressing educational issue or concern and to determine what has or has not proven promising. We position such reviews under the broad heading of “intervention.” It is our contention that marshalling the knowledge and insights to be found in the vast literatures from across disciplines and academic domains can do much to address the “authentic” questions facing education today and in the future (Murphy, 2015). RER, as the premier review journal in education research, should be at the vanguard of such innovation and intervention.
Of central importance to these innovation and intervention reviews are the following two features. First, such reviews must provide transparency, not only in how a critical question came to be posed and how its central constructs are conceptualized but also in how the literature that is to serve as the database for the interrogation was identified. Indeed, the plethora of available information sources places an additional burden on the researcher to be overt in delineating the mechanisms used to separate wheat from chaff and to derive insights for the significant question being addressed. With an eye toward an open community, we strongly encourage authors to provide explicit conceptual and methodological details in their reviews or appendices so that the patterns they derive in their analyses and syntheses can be substantiated. This might include, but is not limited to, technical scripts for meta-analyses or secondary data reviews or tables of codings for systematic reviews. Second, it is of paramount importance that authors articulate potential avenues for addressing the critical question or problem they interrogated based on the findings they have mapped from the literature. In that way, education researchers and policymakers dealing with such concerns have a potential course of action that could be pursued.
Chronicling Advancements
In the first several decades of the journal’s existence, its primary role was to serve as a record of advancements within the field of education, broadly defined. Such chronicling was conducted on a 3-year cycle through the publication of reviews of literature meant to function as mooring points for the “state of the research” in a given area (e.g., curriculum, learning, teacher preparation, educational administration, higher education, education theory, or policy). What was noteworthy about these review articles was the time frame. A period of 3 years was just long enough that authors could meaningfully and systematically overview advancements within a given area. Moreover, such systematic reviews allowed for meta-reviews of progress over longer periods of time (e.g., curriculum; Franklin, 1999). As an editorial team, we believe such reviews were fundamental to establishing the credibility and usefulness of the journal to the field of education. We also hold that such reviews would be similarly useful given the unbridled proliferation of research in the current era. Thus, our goal is to further pursue the possibility of reinstituting a series of “state of the research” reviews representative of diverse education areas during our tenure as editors.
Accessibility
Charles Peirce, 20th-century pragmatist philosopher, often wrote about the need for philosophers to make their ideas clear. If philosophy had pursued this course, Peirce argued, the key insights from that discipline would have been more accessible and, thus, more valuable to those outside the community. As submissions to an education research journal, articles published within RER are written to fellow education scholars or scholars-in-training. Rarely, it would seem, do education researchers have the time, the inclination, or the ability to ensure that their messages are comprehensible and accessible to those outside their community of practice. As the editorial team, we are seeking mechanisms to alter this situation by exploring ways to enhance the “accessibility” of published reviews. Initial steps might include bulleted highlights or 140-character tweets that accompany reviews. Such bulleted highlights and brief statements could then be disseminated by the American Educational Research Association to the broader communities through Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets.
RER remains the premier review journal internationally. We will strive to build on the strengths that have contributed to the journal’s prestige while exploring new roads to improvement. We feel strongly that the familiar paths forged by the former editors combined with new directions toward innovation and intervention will permit RER to be the venue to address the educational challenges of today and those we will face in the years to come.