A student within a university's Ed.D. program is encouraged by her director to narrow her research focus; however, her interests in Curriculum Studies, Arts-Based Educational Research, and Composition Studies led her to design a practitioner action research study examining intersections between the fields. As she collected participants' data, she…

Students as partners (SaP) is becoming an increasingly common notion in higher education , but we continue to grapple with questions around how to best involve our students with the work we do as educators. Queries around responsibility, accountability and trust are raised when considering SaP. Participatory action research is presented from an…

"Educational Research: Planning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research" offers a truly balanced, inclusive, and integrated overview of the processes involved in educational research. This text first examines the general steps in the research process and then details the procedures for conducting specific types…

It is easier than ever to survey stakeholders about issues that confront one's district. A survey offers a way to collect information from many people in a short time at a reasonable cost. The information one collects can be descriptive, such as information solicited from those who voted on the district's budget, including age, income, or whether…

This conceptual model introduces a process to help school counselors use data to drive decision making and offers examples to implement the process. A step-by-step process is offered to help school counselors and school counselor supervisors address educational issues, close achievement gaps, and demonstrate program effectiveness. To illustrate…

As lines between research paradigms continue to blur with the ever-increasing popularity of mixed methods research, there are useful, and occasionally oxymoronic, opportunities for educational researchers to juxtapose tools from opposing methods. The gold standard is just not possible in so much of what we do with small-scale research, nor is it…

Research traditions serve as a blueprint or guide for a variety of design decisions throughout qualitative inquiry. This article presents 6 qualitative research traditions: grounded theory, phenomenology, consensual qualitative research, ethnography, narratology, and participatory action research. For each tradition, the authors describe its…

This paper reports on an innovative approach to oral language development in one British Columbia elementary school, in the context of a larger-scale research project aimed at building cultural inclusive classrooms through the development of imaginative teaching practices. A number of approximately three-week units were designed to lead students…

Teachers' classroom-based action research is sometimes misunderstood by those who undertake it and support it, in three respects. First, it is wrongly assumed to fall into either positivist or interpretive paradigms (or perhaps a mixture of both) or to be critical. Second, there is little understanding as to why action research is necessarily…

Written for pre- and in-service educators, this "Third Edition" of Craig A. Mertler's "Action Research: Improving Schools and Empowering Educators" introduces the process of conducting one's own classroom- or school-based action research in conjunction with everyday instructional practices and activities. The text provides educators with the…

Studio-based research is rich with possibilities for contributing to the body of knowledge concerning creative processes, primarily because it has at its core the "making" disciplines. Nonetheless, for those who teach graduate research courses, this relative new mode of research can be challenging. In this article, the author discusses…

In as much as educational research is concerned with individual student assessment and development, it is surprising that single-subject designs are not more readily utilized in classroom-based action research. The purpose of this article is to emphasize benefits of single-subject research in the K-12 setting, given that teachers teach and assess…

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to describe a design that mixes single-case (sometimes referred to as single-subject) and qualitative methods, hereafter referred to as a single-case mixed methods design (SCD-MM). Minimal attention has been given to the topic of applying qualitative methods to SCD work in the literature. These two…

Business students are increasingly seeking international experience in short-term, study abroad programs to enhance their intercultural knowledge, intercultural communication skills, and global perspectives to be more competitive in the global arena. Intuitively, universities initiating these programs and the students sojourning abroad believe in…

In this article we illustrate how the piloting process has influenced two widely different studies within the educational sciences. These studies differ in design but have as a common denominator that they used piloting methods in their preparatory process. They are also similar in the intention of the main researchers of conducting research with…