Education Research

The Research Enterprise and the Doing of Education Research

Specifically, we open the volume with six chapters that expressly explore the research enterprise and the very process of engaging in education research. The chapter by Nancy Beadie leads off this collection of reviews by investigating the rise of social science research over the decades. Ultimately, it is her contention, grounded in the historical evidence, that social science research pertaining to educational concerns has continued to develop even in the face of what she describes as the “peculiarly decentralized and racialized structure” that has characterized educational policy and authority within the United States (p. 2). This historical analysis is followed by a very specific look at the scholarship that has populated AERA journals over their existence.

The authors of the second chapter in our initial cluster adopted a very different research methodology. Specifically, by means of a very precise analysis of the contents of Review of Educational Research and the American Educational Research Journal from 1931 to 2014, Raf Vanderstraeten, Frédéric Vandermoere, and Maarten Hermans focus on three trends of the past that speak as well to the future of publications in these and other prestigious journals. Those interrelated trends relate to (a) changes in the structures of authority and authorship, (b) the national versus global orientation of the articles, and (c) the citation networks exposed within these publications and the interdisciplinary links that they suggest.

Continuing with this theme of what is researched and what is ultimately published in education-related journals, Amy Stuart Wells and Allison Roda interrogate the literature to understand the potential impact of policy on the questions posed within education research. Their particular interest in this policy–research relation centers on the changing character of research dealing with equity and educational opportunity. It is the authors’ contention that a key to understanding how racial politics and racial policy have influenced education research in the United States over the past century lies in the contrast between a contextual versus a deficit framing of race and education issues.

The next two chapters focus on issues of educational assessment. Eva Baker, Greg Chung, and Li Cai set out to capture the course that achievement testing has followed over the past 100 years. In the retrospective portion of their chapter, the authors examine two parallel purposes of assessment (i.e., measuring effects of education and identifying individual differences). They also take on the thorny issue of the effects of policy on assessment practices. Prospectively, Baker et al. consider the future of educational assessment in terms of the convergence of assessment purposes, the role of innovative learning technology, and the effects of new psychometric challenges.

Larry Hedges, Terri Pigott, Joshua Polanin, Ann Marie Ryan, Charles Tocci, and Ryan Williams similarly investigate the subject of student achievement. Their interest, however, is the effects of school resources on student achievement. In their chapter, they directly confront the challenges of addressing this critical question by means of a meta-analytic approach, as had been done in the recent past, due to the tremendous methodological diversity and inconsistency within the literature. Alternatively, the authors suggest what they call a “collaborative approach” as a mechanism for more effectively exploring the relation between school resources and student achievement. This approach brings together both historical narrative and meta-analysis to better unearth reliable evidence about the interplay between resources and achievement.

We close the first section with a chapter by Jeanne Century and Amy Cassata, who take on the question of implementation research, which they describe as the study of whether and how the multitude of educational interventions and related theories have had any enduring effects on students and on their academic success. The authors argue that there are basic questions that drive implementation research, such as: What are we doing? Is it working? For whom? Where? When? How? And why? They also contend that such an examination of the many interventions already introduced into schools and classrooms is paramount for future intervention development and for the advancements in student learning and performance that are the very goals of such interventions.

The Contexts of Education

The chapters in the next cluster of this volume share thoughtful consideration of the settings or contexts in which education operates. The section begins with David Gamson and Emily Hodge’s inquiry into school districts in the United States and how the institutional form of districts has changed dramatically since the early 19th century. What the authors establish in their extensive review is how the definition of what constitutes a district, along with the criteria as to what constitutes an effective district, has shifted markedly over the past two centuries. Nonetheless, these administrative units remain the primary agent of local control and the principal unit for educational decision making.

In a chapter on urban school privatization, Janelle Scott and Jennifer Jellison Holme apply what they refer to as an “urban political economy framework” to explore how the demographics of school systems and the individual schools that form those systems have become comingled with property values in metropolitan areas. The undesirable outcome of this phenomenon is a growing racial and economic divide between urban and suburban districts. The growing divide has resulted in what the authors characterize as a decrement in property values and corresponding deterioration in the infrastructure of schools, especially for certain cities in the United States. They conclude that such undesirable conditions must be addressed by policy and research if the next century is to ensure greater economic equity in urban districts.

Catharine Biddle and Amy Price Azano carry the exploration of educational contexts away from cities and into rural settings. The focus in their chapter is on shifts in demographics, migratory patterns, economic conditions, and social changes in rural America over the past century. The authors also consider how scholarly interest in rural education research has fluctuated over this time frame. To illustrate the points raised, the authors review research on rural teacher preparation, recruitment, and retention as a case study of the “rural school problem.”

The perspective that Shaun Dougherty and Allison Lombardi offer on the context of education is different from the administrative or geographic contexts in the preceding chapters. In this instance, the authors situate education in the workplace. Specifically, in their investigation into vocational education, Dougherty and Lombardi bring the long-standing debate over the purpose of education to the forefront. From their historical analysis, the authors demonstrate how the relation between schools and the workplace has changed over the past 100 years. They then complement that historical portrayal with a survey of the literature on career and technical education and draw on the survey results to articulate recommendations for the future of vocational education.

The last chapter in this section offers a sociocultural perspective on educational context. Barbara Rogoff, Maureen Callanan, Kris Gutiérrez, and Frederick Erickson set out to demonstrate in their review that informal learning, while retaining its fundamental nature, manifests differently when nested in diverse contexts. For instance, whether informal learning occurs within family or community settings or is part of innovative schools and classrooms, it entails meaningful activities that draw on learners’ interests and personal choices, and the process of acquiring knowledge occurs in nondidactic ways.

The Process and Substance of Learning

Rather than address the “where” of education, the chapters that populate the third section are more concerned with the “what” of education. To initiate this focus, P. Karen Murphy and Stephanie Knight take on the general topic of advances in the science of learning over the past 100 years. Their systematic review not only interrogates the way in which learning has been defined within the literature, focusing on AERA journals as the principal data source, but also examines how beliefs about knowledge and knowing (i.e., epistemic beliefs) have changed over time and how such beliefs are ultimately reflected in the nature of investigations of learning that have been undertaken, including in classrooms.

What follows is an in-depth exploration of epistemic beliefs and, more specifically, of what William Sandoval, Jeffrey Greene, and Ivar Bråten term epistemic cognition. In keeping with the prior chapter, these authors contend that one of the goals of education is to promote reflection on knowledge and processes of knowing. Epistemic cognition, according to the authors, refers to the thinking that people do about what and how they know. In this critical analysis of the research on epistemic cognition, Sandoval et al. attend to what they call “fault lines” within the growing literature. The fault lines include the variability in how this construct is conceptualized and operationalized, as well as the differing accounts of how learners’ epistemic cognition is presumed to develop.

The next three chapters in this section review school subject matter domains—mathematics, science, and literacy. Alan Schoenfeld offers a history of the developments and transformation that have occurred in the research on mathematics education across the past century. Schoenfeld argues through his analysis that the core nature of mathematics as an academic domain has sometimes led to broader trends in the education research literature.

Marcia Linn, Libby Gerard, Camillia Matuk, and Kevin McElhaney take a similarly deep dive into a century of research on science education. They illustrate how technological advances, scientific discoveries, and concomitant developments in science learning and teaching have fueled changes in research over the decades. To encapsulate these changes in the landscape of science education research, the authors focus on the literature pertaining to school-aged populations (i.e., 5- to 17-year-olds). They conclude with recommendations for guiding future research and practice in science learning and science teaching.

George Hruby, Leslie Burns, Stergios Botzakis, Susan Groenke, Leigh Hall, Judson Laughter, and Richard Allington focus on another field that is foundational to formal education—literacy—and they do so in a distinctive way. In particular, they examine how the constructs of motivation and engagement have been embedded in publications in literacy journals and handbooks over the past century. Drawing, as well, on related histories in literacy, education, psychology, and philosophy, the authors craft a narrative history of what they term engaged literacies: that is, a history of students’ active engagement in their own literacy learning.

Moving beyond subject matter domains, David Osher, Yael Kidron, Marc Brackett, Allison Dymnicki, Stephanie Jones, and Roger Weissberg offer an analytic overview of school-based social-emotional learning. Through their interdisciplinary review of the literature, Osher et al. demonstrate that concern for social-emotional learning has a long and storied history. They also establish that interest is growing in this domain of research, fueled, in part, by the growing influence of such related issues as bullying prevention, prevention of drug use and abuse, and emotional intelligence. Based on their trend analysis, the authors offer recommendations for future research and practice in this school-related domain.

The Changing Attention to Diversity and Differences

In the last group of chapters, the contributing authors consider the timely and profound topics of diversity and learner differences as those topics play out in academic contexts. The first of these contributions, by Lucy Bailey and Karen Graves, affords a critical analysis of the relation between gender and education. The authors focus on what they describe as the “broad patterns and key developments” in the research on gender and education that have emerged across the decades. The authors’ mission in this review was to understand how events and tensions that occurred over time helped shape these emerging patterns. They also sought to capture the diversity that is a hallmark of the research on gender and education.

The ensuing chapter, by Jennifer Langer-Osuna and Na’ilah Suad Nasir, looks at yet another arena of education research that has remained both foundational and provocative—race and education. The enticing perspective that the authors bring to this subject centers on the intersection of race, culture, and identity. They chronicle a history of dehumanization that has occurred for marginalized populations and the countermanding efforts of scholars of color to humanize those very same populations. The outcome of these continuing tensions within the social science literature is the emergence of a research literature on cultural identity, which the authors discuss both in contemporary terms and in terms of future directions for research and practice.

Jeanne Powers, Gustavo Fischman, and David Berliner, likewise, seek to bring to the surface a sometimes unseen or disregarded force shaping education and educational outcomes—poverty. By identifying two historical events as catalyzing forces—the 100-year anniversary of AERA and the 50-year anniversary of the infamous Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966)—the authors interrogate the interrelations of poverty, inequality, and schooling. They effectively reveal how these interrelations have manifested in the nexus between education research and educational policy. What we come to see in this penetrating review is how poverty has maintained a place in the science of education and how its place is often contentious and undervalued. Nonetheless, as the authors make apparent, poverty will continue to exert its effects on student learning and education in the years to come, and that influence can no longer be overlooked or disregarded.

The last two chapters in this section turn attention from diversity between groups or segments of society to differences that also exist at the level of individual learners. Alfredo Artiles, Sherman Dorn, and Aydin Bal systematically trace the evolution of disability over the past 100 years as a socially, historically, and spatially constructed notion. Their examination of the rich literature is divided into three historical periods: prior to 1960, 1960 to 1990, and 1990 to the present time. In capturing the character of these periods as it relates to the study of disabilities, the authors synthesize and critique not only the academic literature but also legal and social writings of relevance. Artiles et al. bring their chapter to a close by calling for interdisciplinary research programs that allow for a bicultural orientation to the future study of disabilities, which they rightly depict as a dynamic and complex phenomenon.

In the concluding chapter in this volume, Doris Luft Baker, Deni Lee Basaraba, and Paul Polanco undertake a critical analysis of a topic that has grown appreciably in significance over past decades—the education of learners whose mother language differs from the language of schooling. More specifically, the authors address two associated issues: bilingualism and bilingual education. Framing their analysis within the historical and sociopolitical history of bilingualism, the authors concentrate on two time periods. Their account of the first period, covering 1985 to 2003, expressly weighs the effects that bilingual education in the United States has had on the achievement of English learners. Their account of the second period involves the analysis of research on bilingual education conducted since 2003. What the authors seek to demonstrate in the more recent research is the growing evidence that bilingualism can be cognitively and neurologically advantageous to learners in ways not readily captured in the past.