In this response to John Raven's "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions," Stephen Gorard questions whether Raven's claims that researchers have created a serious threat to the entire earth, perhaps all of science, the process of education, and the field of psychology due to a lack of logic…

For decades there have been calls by concerned stakeholders to improve the quality of education research, and some progress has been made towards creating a more secure evidence base in some areas. More programmes and approaches that have a reasonable evidence base are now also being used in schools (but not in policy, and not necessarily because…

Background: Educational interventions are often complex, and their outcomes could be due to factors not focused on in the impact evaluation. Therefore, educational evaluations using a randomised control trial (RCT) design approach need to go beyond obtaining the impact results alone. Purpose: Process evaluation is embedded in the evaluation design…

There is currently a considerable body of research suggesting that parental involvement is linked to young people's attainment at school. It is also generally agreed that a number of factors such as parental background, attention, warmth and parenting style are associated with children's later life outcomes. However, although widely assumed on the…

This paper is based on a series of previous research studies looking at the impact and development of teachers in the UK and internationally. It suggests that there is no convincing evidence, in terms of test outcomes, that some teachers are more or less effective with equivalent pupils. This is not necessarily because teachers are not…

This research note shows that secondary school segregation by poverty in England has recently started declining again. By comparing the long-term pattern of school compositions with an economic indicator, it is possible to link this decline to the recession, but only if a further, and contentious, assumption is made about what happened in the…

This paper considers the model of school effectiveness (SE) currently dominant in research, policy and practice in England (although the concerns it raises are international). It shows, principally through consideration of initial and propagated error, that SE results cannot be relied upon. By considering the residual difference between the…

This paper uses the notion of "pathological" social science, wherein large claims to knowledge are made on the basis of very small differences in the data, to consider the notion of the school mix effect. It describes a variety of plausible alternative explanations for the same sets of findings, including the school mix effect, but also errors in…

This article considers the emerging method of design experimentation, and its developing use in educational research. It considers the extent to which design experiments are different from other, more established, methods and the extent to which elements of established methods can be adapted for use in conjunction with them. One major issue to be…

This article started as a debate between the two authors. Both authors present a series of propositions about quality standards in education research. Cook's propositions, as might be expected, not only concern the importance of experimental trials for establishing the security of causal evidence, but also include some important practical and…

This paper considers the range of research methods used by the United Kingdom education research community. Using insights from 25 interviews with key stakeholders, it seeks to describe what the current strengths and weaknesses in methods are, and the methodological developments that are needed for the future health of the field. Using survey…

Uses the process of model building in applied settings to examine design experiment (DE) methodology, noting that DE work presented in this issue does not discuss model fitting or broader models of validation. Discusses key areas for the DE community to address, positing that the concept of artifact failure in design research may be a more…

This paper examines underachievement, a widely used term in education policy and practice often used to refer to nations, home nations, and regions; types and sectors of schooling; physiological, ethnic, and social groups; and individuals. It has been used to mean simply low achievement, also lower achievement relative to another of these groups,…

Takes as background the shift over time in Great Britain toward models of target setting in education, based almost entirely on measurable outputs. Outlines some alternative models involving targets for inputs and processes, and use of targets that are exhortative rather than directly measurable. (BT)

Explores cause-effect models and their role in educational research, reviewing various kinds of causal models. Concludes that cause-effect provides a powerful, persuasive, and nearly universal explanation for social and psychological processes despite the inability to detect it directly. (SLD)