Building from established literature and his research, Milner introduces a framework for designing consequential research. The framework is constructed to help researchers design, identify, and assess research as potentially consequential. In particular, the framework is developed for researchers to intentionally include essential elements that…

Researcher-practitioner partnerships have gained increasing prominence within education in recent years, yet scholarship on partnerships and tools to guide partnerships' work remain in their infancy. Drawing on our own work in a partnership as well as analysis of abstracts for the 41 partnerships funded by the Institute of Education Sciences and…

The present article responds briefly to the comments, in this issue of "Educational Researcher," of Petrosino and of Robinson to the "Propagation of Misinformation About Frequencies of RFTs/RCTs in Education: A Cautionary Tale." The authors emphasize that the context of how the quality of education research is perceived both within and outside the…

The authors respond to the commentaries on a series of articles (in the March 2009 issue of "Educational Researcher") that discuss the challenges associated with measuring reading instruction. The authors argue that the teaching of reading is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon best studied through a variety of overlapping and complementary…

How doctoral programs train future researchers in quantitative methods has important implications for the quality of scientifically based research in education. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to examine how quantitative methods are used in the literature and taught in doctoral programs. Evidence points to deficiencies in quantitative…

This article presents the author's response to comments on her article, "Will a Clinical Approach Make Education Research More Relevant for Practice?", which focused on the question of whether a clinical research practice might make education research more relevant for practice. The characteristics of a clinical approach are: (1) an overlap in the…

Responding to Bulterman-Bos (2008), the author argues that the effort to make education research more relevant is counterproductive. Teachers and researchers have different orientations toward education that arise from different institutional settings, occupational constraints, daily work demands, and professional incentives. These are not…

Examines characteristics of educational knowledge produced by educational researchers and considers how this impacts on educational research. Reviews the negative and positive consequences of this structurally egalitarian and substantively divergent knowledge production in education schools. (MMU)

Beginning educational researchers are advised to do the following: (1) choose a research focus with reference to events in the real world of education; (2) augment research with products and services to bring about improvements in educational practice; and (3) find an honest critic to review research work. (SLD)

Studies comparing the external characteristics of instructional methods have obscured the most important variable which accounts for learning from instruction: macroprocesses, or the frequency and intensity with which students cognitively process instructional input. Further research on macroprocesses may be a meeting point between the psychology…

Educational researchers are not engaged in discovering mechanistic universal truths sought by positivists or tidy prescriptions about what works. Instead, they provide guidelines and interpretive material to liberate the teacher's intelligence so that the teacher can use whatever ability he or she can achieve. (SLD)

There are currently the following types of teacher thinking: (1) Preconception and Implicit Theories; (2) Planning and Reflection; and (3) Dilemmas and Uncertainty. Teacher educators should consult with researchers and ask better questions of themselves and their arts in order to better prepare teachers. (Author/BJV)

Advice for doctoral students and fledgling educational researchers presents the following suggestions: (1) use what is known about problem finding to choose a dissertation topic, (2) be persistent in productivity and in the face of discouragement, and (3) replace the typical dissertation structure with a more functional one. (SLD)