Racism primarily has been examined in United States (U.S.) educational contexts via survey and qualitative investigations, which reveal Black, Indigenous, and People of Colors' (BIPOCs') self-reported experiences of individual racism. Missing from this research is a focus on the perpetrators of racism and the institutional nature of racism in U.S.…

Quantitative Critical Race Theory (QuantCrit) is a burgeoning field of study seeking to challenge and improve the use of statistical data in social research. It pulls lessons and insights from Critical Race Theory and applies them to understanding social challenges. In this paper, we aim to improve the quality of quantitative research produced by…

Evidence-based reform in education refers to policies that enable or encourage the use of programs and practices proven to be effective in rigorous research. This article discusses the increasing role of evidence in educational policy, rapid growth in availability of proven approaches, and development of reviews of research to summarize the…

When evaluators plan site-randomized experiments, they must conduct the appropriate statistical power analyses. These analyses are most likely to be valid when they are based on data from the jurisdictions in which the studies are to be conducted. In this method note, we provide software code, in the form of a SAS macro, for producing statistical…

For over a decade, the National Science Foundation's Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program has funded researchers and educators to build an understanding of best practices, contexts, and processes contributing to K-12 students' motivation and participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics…

Background: Cluster randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

When students encounter a set of concepts (or terms or principles) that are similar in some way, they often confuse one with another. For instance, they might mistake one word for another word with a similar spelling (e.g., allusion instead of illusion) or choose the wrong strategy for a mathematics problem because it resembles a different kind of…

With the growing size of the "Millennial Generation" and its potential impact on American democracy, the civic education of this cohort deserves study. Using news media and discussion of politics at home and in the classroom at four public high schools in New Jersey, we conducted an experiment to measure changes in media use, political…

For self-regulated learning to be effective, students need to be able to accurately assess their own performance on a learning task and use this assessment for the selection of a new learning task. Evidence suggests, however, that students have difficulties with accurate self-assessment and task selection, which may explain the poor learning…

Nowadays, computer aided design (CAD) is widely used by designers. Would children learn to draw more easily and more efficiently if they were taught with computerised tools? To answer this question, we made an experiment designed to compare two methods for children to do the same drawing: the classical "pen and paper" method and a CAD…

As evidence-based reform becomes increasingly important in educational policy, it is becoming essential to understand how research design might contribute to reported effect sizes in experiments evaluating educational programs. The purpose of this study was to examine how methodological features such as types of publication, sample sizes, and…

This study explores the effect of multidimensional concept mapping instruction on students' learning performance in a web-based computer course. The subjects consisted of 103 fourth graders from an elementary school in central Taiwan. They were divided into three groups: multidimensional concept map (MCM) instruction group, Novak concept map (NCM)…

Our paper is an analytical review of the design, development and reporting of learning progressions and teaching sequences. Research questions are: (1) what criteria are being used to propose a "hypothetical learning progression/trajectory" and (2) what measurements/evidence are being used to empirically define and refine a "hypothetical learning…

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) support students in learning a complex problem-solving skill. One feature that makes an ITS architecturally complex, and hard to build, is support for strategy freedom, that is, the ability to let students pursue multiple solution strategies within a given problem. But does greater freedom mean that students…

The uneven distribution of knowledge within modern societies requires a reliance on sources (e.g., reference books, teachers, the Internet) in addition to own experience. Most scientific issues are far too complex to be understood in any depth by laypersons. Successful knowledge acquisition comprises the ability to vary the amount of sources used…