Drawing from the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity (AMO) framework, this paper aims to study the influence of academic researchers' ability, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and opportunity on their performance. We conducted an empirical analysis using a sample of 607 academic researchers to examine the relationships between the three AMO…

Whether the goal is to identify and describe trends and variation in populations, create new measures of key phenomena, or describe samples in studies aimed at identifying causal effects, description plays a critical role in the scientific process in general and education research in particular. Descriptive analysis identifies patterns in data to…

In this paper, we investigate the in-service teachers "sense of agency" after their participation in a research master course. A semi-structured interview was administrated to nine in-service science teachers, coming from three different African countries: Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Burkina Faso. All of them attended a European master course…

This study suggests a novel approach, which integrates an explicit-reflective nature of science (NOS) instruction into the teachers-as-researchers approach to improve pre-service science teachers' conceptions of NOS. Participants were 48 university fourth-year students in a four-year pre-service science teacher-training program in Turkey. The…

Introductory educational research courses are often based on the scientific model of research derived from natural science. Scientific research using theoretical constructs and measurement of variables establishes a body of verified knowledge through replication of experiments. The conceptualization of the introductory research course presented in…

It is useful to place the development of educational research within the context of the historical development of scientific research as a whole. The work of Whitehead, Northrop, Toulmin, and, especially, Kuhn suggests the value of viewing research as a social process through which ideas and intellectual techniques are diffused. It is useful for…