American Educational Research Association Research Articles

100 Years of Curriculum History, Theory, and Research

This article reviews a collection of papers written by the American Educational Research Association’s first 50 presidents that deal specifically with curricular issues. It characterizes the ways in which curricula were conceptualized, implemented, and assessed, with an eye toward the epistemological and methodological framings that the authors brought to bear. The analysis reveals interesting lines of continuity as well as significant changes from 1916 until now, the Association’s centennial anniversary.

And Then There Is This Thing Called the Curriculum

Despite the long history of curriculum studies in the American Educational Research Association, few past presidents have used their presidential addresses to speak about the curriculum and its importance in education research and teaching. In this essay, I examined the presidential addresses (and paper) of three well-known curriculum theorists—Harold Rugg, Maxine Greene, and Eliot Eisner—to share their perspectives on the curriculum as a vehicle for public discourse and democratic engagement. The essay ends with a challenge to AERA members to continue to use the study of curriculum as a vehicle for democracy, civic participation, and a more equitable and just society.

Exploring a Century of Advancements in the Science of Learning

The past century has yielded a plethora of advancements in the science of learning, from expansions in the theoretical frames that undergird education research to cultural and contextual considerations in educational practice. The overarching purpose of this chapter is to explore and document the growth and development of the science of learning using a tripartite approach. The authors first provide an overview of definitions of learning that have been forwarded in the extant literature, with particular emphasis on journals published by the American Educational Research Association. Next, they overview the epistemic frames that have undergirded investigations of learning during the past century. Finally, they explore the ways in which the nature of investigations of learning has transitioned over time and how these transitions have manifested themselves in settings such as classrooms. In reflecting on the maturation and adaptation of the science of learning over the past century, the authors conclude with thoughts on the future of the science of learning.

Assessment Gaze, Refraction, and Blur

This chapter addresses assessment (testing) with an emphasis on the 100-year period since the American Education Research Association was formed. The authors start with definitions and explanations of contemporary tests. They then look backward into the 19th century to significant work by Horace Mann and Herbert Spencer, who engendered two parallel purposes for assessment: evaluating effects of education and identifying individual differences. The authors consider the interplay of these orientations over the years. After discussing policy impacts on assessment, they discuss the evolution of the concept of validity as it relates to changing rationales for testing. To enrich the reader’s comprehension, the authors also discuss perspectives on innovation in technology and in quantitative analysis. They conclude with questions that summarize current concerns with assessment. Finally, they consider future prospects for assessment. They foresee the continued convergence of assessment purposes, innovative learning technology, and new psychometric challenges.

The Role of Relevance in Education Research, as Viewed by Former Presidents

American Educational Research Association presidents’ presidential addresses have only intermittently considered relevance as a criterion of quality for education research. A few, though, argued that education research could only distinguish itself from research in the disciplines through attention to improving educational outcomes. David Krathwohl (1969) called for a coherent community encompassing practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. Philip Jackson (1990) urged that local research knowledge, rather than research-based dictates, be communicated. Alan Schoenfeld (1999) challenged education researchers simultaneously to build knowledge and offer solutions to practical problems. He anticipated current research-practice partnerships and shifts toward practice-embedded research supports. But only if the larger education research enterprise supports these efforts will the shift be radical and robust enough to persist and survive.

Making the Visible Invisible

The year 2016 marks the 100th anniversary of the American Educational Research Association and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Equality of Educational Opportunity, known as the Coleman Report. These key moments in the field’s history ushered in important paradigm shifts in the practice of education research; in how the relationships among poverty, inequality, and schooling were understood; and in the research-policy nexus. This conceptual synthesis of the history of education research in the United States is focused on poverty knowledge in both periods. The authors trace the rise of education as a field of study, the place of poverty in the emergent science of education, and the extent to which leading researchers have acknowledged, analyzed, or contested poverty. The Coleman Report advanced a new paradigm for analysis while being firmly rooted in earlier traditions. Coleman’s analytical approach has become common sense in educational policymaking in the form of the accountability movement. The report’s fundamental insights about the relationship between poverty and student achievement too often remain unacknowledged by U.S. policymakers.

Research in Mathematics Education

As one of the three Rs, “’ rithmetic” has always been central to education and education research. By virtue of that centrality, research in mathematics education has often reflected and at times led trends in education research. This chapter provides some deep background on epistemological and other issues that shape current research, with a primary focus on empirical research, which sprouted and flowered over the past 100 years or so—roughly coinciding with the existence of the American Educational Research Association as a professional organization. The author begins by tracing the growth and change in research in mathematics education and its interdependence with research in education in general over much of the 20th century, with an emphasis on changes in research perspectives and methods and the philosophical/empirical/disciplinary approaches that underpin them. He then turns to an overview of currently flourishing research and some indications of potentially productive arenas for future work.

Testing and Assessment for the Good of Education

Early presidents of the American Educational Research Association were leaders in the testing movement. Their intentions were to improve education by means of testing, which included both IQ and achievement tests. Early measurement experts acknowledged in scholarly articles that IQ tests could not measure inherited ability of groups with vastly different opportunities to learn, and yet ability testing was promoted as a beneficial means for matching instruction to individual differences until the insights of the civil rights era in the 1960s. Standard achievement measures were developed importantly to allow valid comparisons across school systems and over time, but the representations of learning that were adequate 100 years ago came to have distorting effects on teaching and learning. Today’s young psychometricians have opportunities to create new assessments in partnership with curriculum experts, but they should remain alert to the ways that well-intentioned assessment systems have been corrupted in the past.

Scholarly Communication in AERA Journals, 1931 to 2014

Scientific disciplines build on social structures, such as scholarly associations and scholarly journals, that facilitate the formation of communities of specialists. Analyses of such social structures can thus also be used to shed light on the morphogenesis of scientific specializations. The authors analyze how two journals of the American Educational Research Association, the Review of Educational Research and the American Educational Research Journal, organized communication around education in the period between 1931 and 2014. The authors focus on three interrelated aspects: (a) the changing structures of authority and authorship, (b) the national-versus-global orientation of these journals and of the association, and (c) the features of the citation networks of both journals and the ties between education research and other fields of research, especially psychology and sociology. The authors’ analyses of these interrelated aspects of the communication process enable them to provide an outline of the morphology of the community of education researchers and to raise reflectivity about the social conditions that control education research.

Research to Controversy in 10 Decades

This article investigates the persistent and change elements of educational testing and assessment from 1920 to the present day. I show by examining the addresses and texts of American Educational Research Association presidents a continuing focus on schools, from early experiments and development up through applications in accountability systems. Continuing topics include sources of test content and uses of tests for equity, effectiveness, support of teaching, and comparisons of alternative methods through experiments or references to standards. Although early writers appeared very close to school practices, later discussions expanded implications for policy uses.

Analysis of Pedagogical Content Knowledge Studies in the Context of Mathematics Education in Turkey: A Meta-Synthesis Study

Existing studies conducted on education have aimed to contribute to educational reforms by focusing mostly on students. Both in Turkey and throughout the world, further studies are required to analyze teachers in addition to students, particularly teachers' knowledge base needs further investigation. Educational research should not necessarily be associated only with those conducted by collecting data in the field. Meta-synthesis studies that offer general outlooks on previous studies are also required in the field of education. To address this gap in the literature, this article aims to analyze studies in Turkey that have investigated pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in the field of mathematics education.The concept of pedagogical content knowledge was first introduced by Lee S. Shulman at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in 1985. Shulman (1986) argued that there was an imbalance between content knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge and that no relation had been established between these two types of knowledge; he described this deficiency as the missing paradigm. With an effort to eliminate this deficiency, Shulman (1987) defined PCK as the special combination of content knowledge and pedagogy. Shulman conceptualized PCK in two categories. The first category is the knowledge of teaching strategies and representations that suggest how to organize, represent, and adapt the subjects that are taught. The second category is the knowledge of students' subject understanding at different levels. These two components are the unique professional expertise of teachers who act as the bridge connecting content and pedagogical knowledge.Despite the fact that Shulman's conceptualization of PCK is considered a cornerstone in the literature, he was later criticized by scholars working in this field. Depaepe, Verschaffel, and Kelchtermans (2013) collected the criticisms directed at Shulman's PCK model under five categories. The first was the lack of a theoretical and empirical basis for the presence of PCK as a separate category in the knowledge base of teachers. The second was related to his static view of PCK as a type of factual knowledge that could be acquired and applied independently from the classroom context. The third criticism arose from the concern of researchers about the possibility of theoretically and empirically distinguishing PCK from content knowledge. The fourth was that Shulman conceptualized PCK in a very narrow framework under two categories. The fifth one relied on the argument that PCK cannot be normative, as it can vary according to culture.In accordance with the criticisms in the literature, several scholars from different subject areas restructured Shulman's PCK model in different ways in an attempt to clarify the borders between PCK and other types of knowledge. In this context, the first studies on PCK were conducted by Shulman's colleagues (Grossman, 1990; Marks, 1990). Grossman, one colleague of Shulman, expressed PCK, which Shulman had framed too narrowly, by widening it. Grossman (1990) divided PCK into four components: (a) knowledge of students' understanding, (b) knowledge of teaching strategies, (c) knowledge of teaching purposes, and (d) knowledge of curriculum. Grossman expanded Shulman's PCK model by adding knowledge of teaching strategies and knowledge of curriculum as separate components in PCK.Marks (1990), another colleague of Shulman, divided PCK into four components in light of his empirical study's findings: (a) knowledge of subject matter, (b) knowledge of students' understanding, (d) knowledge of teaching media, such as materials, books, and so on, and (d) knowledge of teaching processes. Marks argued that these four components were not independent from each other but that they intensively interacted with each other. He advocated his argument, expressing that a mathematics teacher, when deciding whether or not the examples of mathematical operations in a course book are sufficient, reflects to a certain extent his/her knowledge of media for content education, knowledge of teaching processes, and knowledge of students' content comprehension. …

On This Issue's Cover

This issue's cover features Getting to Responses by Ruth A. Childs and Susan Elgie from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. It is one of the two winning submissions to the 2015 EM:IP Cover Graphic/Data Visualization competition. This figure is a graphical depiction of a student's item response times on a computer-based test. Getting to Responses was developed from a study investigating how fifth-grade students deal with uncertainty as they respond to multiple-choice test items. This example shows the progress of one Grade 5 student through a computer-administered 20-item multiple-choice test based on a short video. Five of the 20 items were unanswerable from information in the video: three items were covered in the video, but did not include a correct option and two were not covered at all. Screen capture software was used to track student cursor movements. The study was particularly focused on students’ response behavior for the unanswerable items, which were designed to invoke uncertainty. Following examinees’ completion of the test, they participated with a researcher in a think-aloud session and brief Interview. Childs and Elgie developed the figure to facilitate identification of patterns of correct and incorrect responses for each examinee and comparison among examinees. Using a set of figures, the researchers could identify patterns of nonresponse, item changing and item reviewing behaviors, as well as items on which an examinee took a long time to respond (long horizontal segments) and times when an examinee was scrolling instead of looking at a specific item (slanted segments). The analysis also included excerpts from the think-aloud sessions; using NVivo software, the transcribed texts were aligned with the screen-capture video. Initial findings from these mixed-methods analyses were presented at the 2015 conferences of the American Educational Research Association (Childs, Elgie, Tang, & Ferguson, 2015a) and the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (Childs, Ferguson, Tang, & Elgie, 2015b). The figure can easily be created using standard software. Specifically, this figure was created in Excel from a spreadsheet containing six columns: the cumulative time to each action (responding or scrolling to another item), the number of the items involved in the action, and the action (leaving the item without responding, responding correctly, responding incorrectly, or responding to an unanswerable item). The symbols for each action were overlaid on the chart by using five “Marked Scatter” series based on the first column in combination with each of the other columns. Childs and Elgie's Getting to Responses is a relatively simple yet informative graphic about a student's response time by item. Although the type of graph—a step graph relating item ID to elapsed time—is not unique, the figure's incorporation of different symbols and line segments to tell a story make it original. Indeed, this submission to the EM:IPCover Graphic competition received the highest scores on the Originality criterion. This figure may also strike viewers as unique in its orientation or choice of axes. The axes are switched from how we are probably accustomed to seeing them where item ID is typically plotted on the x axis and elapsed time on the y axis. Perhaps, Childs and Elgie set up the graph as they did because this computer-based test allowed examinees to return to previously presented items. Thus, if elapsed time was on the y axis, the stepwise function would not always be increasing; it would involve “backwards” steps whenever students returned to previous items. However, by putting elapsed time on the x axis, Getting to Responses shows a decreasing trend when students respond to items in the order they are presented. Such a trend seems less natural or counterintuitive when considering elapsed time as a variable, and although this feature adds to the uniqueness of the figure, it may detract from its interpretability. The clear labels for the axis and plotting symbols help Getting to Responses stand alone and tell its own story (another criterion in the competition). But the inclusion of “responses to unanswerable items” may need further explanation and context as we typically strive to exclude unanswerable items from standardized student achievement assessments. Thus, I, at least, was unsure on first viewing the figure what was meant by such item types. In addition, it seems that a large part of the story we may want to tell with a graphic like the one pictured on the cover is how different types of students compare in their responses and response-time trajectories. A more compelling version of this figure may thus show trajectories for two different students, such as a high- and low-performing student, overlaid on the same graph or side by side. What do you think? Please send us your feedback by emailing derek.briggs@colorado.edu.

Blacks in Research

A version of this article, “Blacks in Research? How Shall We Be Portrayed?”, was delivered by the author as the 2013 W. E. B. Du Bois Distinguished Lecture to the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Blacks in Education Special Interest Group (Black SIG). This article examines the portrayal of Blacks in research and urges a renaissance among Black intellectuals, specifically calling for Black and progressive other scholars to lead a national movement to present rarely highlighted positive data and research findings about the Black condition—especially those which challenge persistent negative reports and racist notions about Black people.

Dramatic impact of action research of arts-based teaching on at-risk students

This study was presented at the American Educational Research Association 2012 conference in Vancouver, Canada. The study explored how action research of arts-based teaching (ABT) impacted at-risk students in three urban public schools in southern California, USA. ABT was defined as using arts, music, drama, and dance in teaching other subjects. A cycle of planning, action, observation, and reflection of the action research took one year. Participants included an emotionally disturbed first-grade boy whose father was recently killed violently, 4 sixth-grade students with learning disorders, and a class of 19 students from a probationary high school. Photo-elicitation combined with narrative inquiry, drama in English language arts, and visual arts in high school world history were integrated. Various observational notes, interviews, surveys, and assessments were collected and analyzed. Data analysis showed dramatic impact of ABT on the at-risk students’ behavior, motivation, and academic achievement.

Assessment of the Mexican Board of Pediatric Surgery Certification System

To evaluate the quality of the Mexican Board of Pediatric Surgery (MBPS) certifying system, using contemporary international guidelines. Retrospective assessment of evidence collected during the design and implementation processes of 2 consecutive applications of the MBPS certifying examination, using Cizek's checklist for evaluating credential-testing programs. It includes the relevant guidelines from the American Education Research Association, the American Psychological Association, the National Council on Measurement in Education, and the National Commission for Certifying Agencies. Four independent and previously trained raters used the checklist. They underwent a 2-week training using frame-of-reference and performance dimensions methodologies. Certification examinations of MBPS. The 2013 and 2014 MBPS certification examinations, with 111 evidence items of the processes, followed for the assessment of 86 examinees. The checklist internal consistency was 0.89. Absolute interrater agreement was 0.34 for the 2013 and 0.66 for the 2014 editions of the examination. The 2013 examination complied with 55 (64%) of the checklist 86 items, in 2014 with 72 (84%). In 2014, the certifying system reached a quality of 84%. For optimal fulfillment of its social responsibility, the MBPS is required to maintain its level of quality and attempt to improve its performance.

Book Review: Multiple Perspectives of Teacher Noticing: An Emerging Area of Research

“Noticing matters” (p. 223). Through these words in the concluding chapter, Alan Schoenfeld succinctly captures the theme of this seminal book, Mathematics Teacher Noticing: Seeing Through Teachers' Eyes. The book received the American Education Research Association 2013 Exemplary Research in Teaching and Teacher Education Award. It addresses a variety of meanings and interpretations of teacher noticing from Dewey's earlier work of inner and outer attention to more specific variations such as that of professional noticing, as defined by Jacobs, Lamb, and Philipp. Chapter contributors have provided the foundation and framing of teacher noticing as a construct for studying and improving teaching.

One Small Droplet

Most members of the American public will never read this article. Instead, they will obtain much of their information about education from the news media. Yet little academic research has examined the type or quality of education research and expertise they will find there. Through the lens of gatekeeping theory, this mixed-methods study aims to address that gap by examining the prevalence of news media citations of evidence that has undergone the quality-control measure of peer review and expertise associated with academics generally required to have expertise in their fields. Results suggest that, unlike science or medical journalists, education writers virtually never cite peer-reviewed research. Nor do they use the American Educational Research Association as a resource. Academic experts are also underrepresented in news media coverage, especially when compared to government officials. Barriers between the news media and academia include structural differences between research on education and the medical or life sciences as well as journalists’ lack of knowledge of the definition and value of peer review and tendency to apply and misapply news values to social science research and expertise.

The Early Childhood Education of American Indian and Alaska Native Children: State of the Research

This article builds upon a review of the literature originally commissioned by the Office of Indian Education and the U.S. Department of Education and expanded as part of a 2010 symposium on American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) education sponsored by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and hosted by Arizona State University. The goal is to provide a snapshot of the state of the research in early childhood education for AI/AN children and to offer potential implications for practice and future research.

Development and Validation of a Science Inquiry Skills Assessment

ABSTRACTThis paper reports on the development and validation of a science inquiry skills assessment for Earth science (iSA–Earth Science) in middle schools that classroom teachers can use to assess and monitor their students' science inquiry skills. An assessment framework with six primary inquiry skills, each with three to six subskills, was developed based on a comprehensive review of the literature and following the recommendations of the National Science Education Standards (NSES; NRC, 1996) and A Framework for K–12 Science Education (FSE; NRC, 2012). The six primary skills are: (1) identify questions for scientific investigations, (2) design scientific investigations, (3) use tools and techniques to gather data, (4) analyze and describe data, (5) explain results and draw conclusions, and (6) recognize alternative explanations and predictions. The assessment development and validation process followed guidelines from the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (American Educational Research Association [AERA], American Psychological Association [APA], and National Council of Measurement in Education [NCME], 1999). Psychometric analysis using both classical test statistics and Item Response Theory showed the instrument was internally consistent, reliable, and did not function differentially for male and female students. Implications for science education practice and research are discussed.

Action researchers’ perspectives about the distinguishing characteristics of action research: a Delphi and learning circles mixed-methods study

The purpose of this study was to identify distinguishing characteristics of action research within the Action Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. The authors sought to delineate the foundational framework endorsed by this community. The study was conducted during January–April 2012 and employed an emergent simultaneous mixed-methods design utilizing Delphi and learning circles methodologies. The findings include 30 distinguishing characteristics of action research practiced within this knowledge community. The discussion addresses the challenges associated with defining action research, specific definitional issues, and prospects for opening dialogical spaces within which action researchers co-create knowledge. Potential implications for action research include: constructing boundaries of conceptual frameworks in action research; fostering coherence across action research studies; contributing to quality and rigor in critiquing action research; and supporting deeper dialogue on the established boundaries of action research frameworks.