Attention to evaluation quality is commonplace, even if sometimes implicit. Drawing on her 2010 Presidential Address to the American Evaluation Association, Leslie Cooksy suggests that evaluation quality depends, at least in part, on the intersection of three factors: (a) evaluator competency, (b) aspects of the evaluation environment or context,…

The article continues the discussion of the five quality principles proposed by Heikkinen, Huttunen, and Syrjala, published in 2007 in "Educational Action Research". In the present article, the authors reconsider the five principles: historical continuity; reflexivity; dialectics; workability; and evocativeness. These five principles are…

The purpose of this theoretical study was to explore, examine, and analyze the United States (US) Zero Tolerance (ZT) educational policies and practices of the school-to-prison pipeline phenomenon. This study specifically explored the influence of the ZT policy on African American males becoming part of that system. The study was guided by three…

Comments on an article by J. J. Arnett regarding the assertion that American psychology focuses too narrowly on Americans while neglecting the other 95% of the world's population. The authors challenge Arnett's methodology in his research and question the ways in which he drew his conclusions. They claim that a major weakness of Arnett's…

Treatment fidelity reporting practices are described for journals that published general and special education intervention research with high impact factors from 2005 through 2009. The authors reviewed research articles, reported the proportion of intervention studies that described fidelity measurement, detailed the components of fidelity…

This "Research Commentary" explores the roles of theoretical and empirical work in the development of productive lines of research by elaborating on 3 main points. First, the dialectic between theory and empirical practice is highly productive for both: Theory is enriched by close attention to data, and one's understanding of empirical issues is…

This article reports on the development and results of a recent survey of academic librarians about their attitudes, involvement, and perceived capabilities using and engaging in primary research. The purpose of the survey was to inform the development of a continuing education program in research design. It updates earlier studies of academic…

The author finds Roland S. Persson's (2012a) paper to be timely, fascinating, important and powerful. At risk of mixing metaphors, it provides much food for thought and a penetrating lens through which all those vested in the optimal realisation of human potential would be prudent to review their own perceptions, boundaries of belief and…

Dr. Persson's (2012a) target article addresses a number of key points that will greatly impact the study of giftedness, gifted education, and talent development in the "flat" world of the 21st century and beyond. Research in these areas needs to continually reflect upon changes in the social world outside its narrow purview to validate its…

The author recognises the fact that knowledge of cultural diversity and its implications is growing in the field of giftedness research and practice. In some ways, the target article could therefore be considered "old news." The author contends that his effort to address culture variation and its problematic impact on research, however, is not to…

The commentaries on my article contain a number of points with which I disagree but also several with which I agree. For example, I continue to believe that the existence of many cases in which between-person variability does not increase with age indicates that greater variance with increased age is not inevitable among healthy individuals up to…

"Art-Based Research" (McNiff, 1998a) introduced the idea of using artistic expressions by researchers as ways of knowing and methods of inquiry as distinguished from approaching art made by subjects as data which are interpreted by discursive methods, a practice that has been widely used in various disciplines studying human behaviour.…

Being a novice researcher undertaking research interviews with young children requires understandings of the interview process. By investigating the interaction between a novice researcher undertaking her first interview and a child participant, the authors attend to theoretical principles, such as the competence of young children as informants,…

Introduction: The introductory part of this paper underlines the research interest of the educational community in the issue of non-verbal communication in education. The question for the introduction of this scientific field in Greek education enter within the context of this research which include many aspects. Method: The paper essentially…

The purpose of this study is to examine Turkish educational technology studies in the academic literature within the scope of SSCI, and to reveal methodological trends within these studies. For this purpose, 460 Turkey-addressed articles, published between the years of 2000-2009 in 32 international journals, within the scope of 2010 SSCI were…