The International Journal of Research & Method in Education calls for scholarly papers for a Special Issue focused on theoretical and methodological contributions and critiques of the 'what works' agenda in educational research. The Special Issue editors note an unresolved debate around this which covers a spectrum of topics including performativity, effectiveness, equality, equity, assessment, improvement, and causality, and the best methods for investigating these issues. A key aspect is the agreement on all sides that research demonstrates quality and relevance, but have we come to a consensus as a community about how we recognise when this is the case?
The Special Issue will be a set of papers that informs other researchers on new perspectives, methods and methodologies that best contribute to educational effectiveness agenda/debate and to inform working solutions for the educational research arena. New critical standpoints on and analyses of the 'what works?' agenda will be welcome, but the editors also hope the Special Issue will take forward thinking about possibilities for responses to well-known criticisms. It is already seen in the literature how contextual value added analyses respond to some of the weaknesses in traditional school effectiveness research, how diagnostic individual and group feedback mechanisms can be developed into summative grading/testing technologies, and how measuring a broader range of learning outcomes might respond to some 'backwash' critiques of performance measurement. The Special Issue editors would like to see some further contributions of this sort. Papers should thus address, but not be limited to, the following themes and issues:
- The rhetoric of performativity and accountability in education;
- New methodologies in experimental research designs;
- Impact evaluations and Randomised Control Trials (RCTs);
- Searching for and justifying causality;
- The role of sampling, validity and bias, effect sizes, and power analysis;
- The role of systematic reviews and meta-analysis;
- The contribution of qualitative approaches (and mixed methods);
- Ethical considerations;
- Measurement related issues and advances;
- Large scale national and international comparative studies and assessments (e.g. TIMSS, PISA);
- Issues around multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisiplinarity;
- Contributions from action research and reflective practice approaches;
- The role of secondary and observational data analysis;
- Dissemination (and relevant approaches) of research findings to reach policy stakeholders.
Submissions should be accessible to a general education academic readership who might not be specialist in the particular area of methodology of the submission. Papers are welcome from educational contexts across the world.
Deadline for abstract submissions is 28 February 2015. For further information please see the full call details.