Secondary special education and transition research is crucial for improving outcomes for students with disabilities during their transition to postschool life. However, rural schools are underrepresented in this field, hindering the development of tailored interventions that can support youth with disabilities as they transition into adult life…

Recruiting schools to participate in research projects has become increasingly challenging in the past several years. Research in schools was next-to-impossible during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the aftermath of the pandemic has made research a lower priority for schools trying to regain COVID-related academic losses. The School Recruitment…

Talented leaders are essential to building and sustaining successful organizations. This is especially true for schools, where principal leadership plays a major role in fostering student success. Research shows that principals are a significant school-level factor affecting student achievement, second only to classroom teachers. Like other types…

This paper presents best practices for conducting survey research using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Readers will learn the benefits, limitations, and trade-offs of using MTurk as compared to other recruitment services, including SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics. A synthesis of survey design guidelines along with a sample survey are presented to help…

This guide provides experienced education researchers with suggestions for conducting high-quality effectiveness studies to overcome research challenges common to rural settings. The guide addresses four factors that researchers must consider when conducting educational effectiveness research in rural settings: (1) study design, (2) recruitment of…

This manual is a practical training guide for graduate and undergraduate research assistants (RAs) working in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. It may also be applicable to research assistants working in other fields or institutions. The purpose of this manual is to train RAs on how to plan and conduct focus groups for…

Talented leaders are essential to building and sustaining successful organizations. This is especially true for schools, where principal leadership plays a major role in fostering student success. Research shows that principals are a significant school-level factor affecting student achievement, second only to classroom teachers. Like other types…

An opportunistic experiment is a type of randomized controlled trial that studies the effects of a planned intervention or policy change with minimal added disruption and cost. This guide defines opportunistic experiments and provides examples, discusses issues to consider when identifying potential opportunistic experiments, and outlines the…

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) represents teachers and researchers of composition and communication in all possible genres, media, contexts, and exigencies; for the purpose of these guidelines, "writers" and "writing" will be all-encompassing, and the term "researcher" will refer to…

There is growing interest in understanding how different research methods are perceived by victims of violence and what survivors will reveal to researchers (termed "meta-research" or "meta-studies"). The purpose of this project was to conduct a qualitative meta-study on why rape survivors chose to participate in community-based, face-to-face…

There is almost nothing more frustrating to an institutional researcher than seeing university leaders ignore data. The case study in this article examines how an institutional research office was able to put data to work in enrollment services and produce record-setting numbers of applications, admissions, and confirmations within a nine-month…

Few studies examine ethical issues in bereavement research and none survey the opinions of bereaved individuals who have not previously participated in bereavement research. This study examined the theoretical opinions of bereaved adults about ethical issues such as attitudes toward bereavement research, timing and methods of recruitment, and…

Participation rates in parenting programs are typically low, severely limiting the public health significance of these interventions. We examined predictors of parenting program enrollment and retention in a sample of 325 divorced mothers. Predictors included intervention timing and maternal reports of child, parent, family, and sociocultural risk…

Research in the field of learning disability presents particular ethical challenges when obtaining consent from participants. This is further exacerbated when the nature of the research requires participation at all ability levels and involves people with communication impairments. The process of obtaining consent in a research study with 48…

This report from Hennepin County, Minnesota, examines the findings of a three-year recruitment study which involves a large sample and includes well-detailed findings. (Author/RWB)