This personal, tentative, self-reflective essay explores some Japanese ways of conducting comparative educational research. In this essay, I not only describe a Japanese style of conducting comparative education research but also do so in a Japanese way. The four key elements I discuss are: daijini (taking care), soboku (simplicity), nagaime (long…

When evidence enters humanities and society, with its scientific and effective characteristics, it gradually becomes a new paradigm for educational research and practice. It is becoming popular worldwide (Slavin, 2020). At present, all over the world, evidence-oriented evidence-based research has become one of the critical analysis methods in the…

Physics education research (PER) is a global endeavor, with a wealth of work performed at a variety of institutions worldwide. However, results from research into undergraduate physics laboratory courses are often difficult to compare due to the broad variations in courses. We report here how we developed and validated a survey to classify these…

Since 2013, the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education has covered the significant developments in the field of comparative and international education. This year's edition begins with a collection of reflective essays about comparative education trends and directions written by both professional and scholarly leaders in the…

One way to look at some of the scholars in English-language comparative education in the 1960s is to see them as being concerned with "methods." They themselves emphasised that they were re-thinking "method" in comparative education. Victories were won and courses were rewritten. That "historic" moment is taught (if…

In times of globalisation of higher education, alternative theoretical and methodological approaches were introduced in the field of comparative higher education research. To stimulate the debate on this issue, this paper firstly addresses them theoretically by combining the concept of institutional isomorphism and the 'glonacal' analytical…

The article draws attention to the forgotten ancestry of the "four steps of comparison" model (description--interpretation--juxtaposition--comparison). Comparativists largely attribute this to George Z. F. Bereday [1964. "Comparative Method in Education." New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston], but among German scholars, it is…

This article considers the contributions of Indigenous knowledges to educational research. It proposes the term "comparative Indigenous education research" (CIER) in an effort to promote Indigenous-centred research approaches in comparative and international Indigenous education studies. Through CIER, Indigenous peoples and communities…

The field of comparative and international education has followed methodological trends in social science research since the merging of the "twin" field after World War II. With increase in the use of mixed methods research about three decades ago, comparative and international education journals and scholars have worked rigorously to be…

Research involving children, deemed to have difficulties with conventional means of communication, can perpetuate reductive forms of representation of children's knowledges and experiences. This article focuses on the possibilities and opportunities that visual and creative methods can offer to researching with children. Children advance their…

In recent years, Southeast Asia region has grown rapidly, particularly in the field of education due to the development of human capital and the influence of globalization. Rigorous educational researches have emerged from and was conducted in Southeast Asia countries. The purpose of this study is to critically examine educational research…

In recent years, more and more international comparative higher education studies have been conducted in internationally and geographically spread project teams and comparative higher education has become a fundamentally collaborative effort. Accordingly, researchers in such projects have to cope with the methodological complexity of international…

The paper offers a critical appraisal of the global knowledge developments in education using China's contributions in a fashion similar to a case study. The paper scrutinizes the complicity of Western educational research to euro-centric biases and discusses the pursuit of a global epistemological eclecticism. To support this claim, the magnitude…

This article presents a cartography of the field of research in adult learning and education (ALE) via a comparative study of academic production at doctoral level in Spain and Portugal based on a systematic documentary analysis of the summaries of doctoral theses concluded between 2006 and 2018. The aim is to advance the state of the art of…

This chapter looks at how various scholars have attempted to structure the "infinite field" by defining the appropriate theory and methods. These efforts have centered on a conception of what it would take to make comparative education a "science," and how one could achieve "objective knowledge." While these concerns…