This article sets a theoretical foundation to transformative mixed methods research that is rooted in the critical theory of Habermas and Honneth. This addresses Habermas’s knowledge-constitutive interests and communicative action for redressing societal pathologies, and Honneth’s work on (mis)recognition, (dis)respect, and social justice. In doing so, the article argues for broadening the scope and embrace of mixed methods research, to go beyond being empirical research only or largely, and to include theorisation, critical theoretical discourse and its analysis, and ideology critique, as legitimate methods for (transformative) mixed methods research. The article makes a case for these methods as constituting important research methods in themselves in the portfolio of mixed methods research, moving the boundaries of mixed methods research beyond solely empirical studies, and providing emancipatory lenses and consciousness-raising in recognising that transformation takes many forms.

The philosophy of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, fundamental to Waldorf education, provides an alternative view on education to that in the non-western world. The article illustrates a rhizomatic, informal diffusion of 'alternative education' in contrast to 'policy borrowing' in education, reporting how Waldorf education and Anthroposophy are regarded and operated in an East Asian context. An initial exploratory study of this provides insider perspectives of 'knowledgeable' practitioners in Waldorf early childhood centres in East Asia, regarding their understanding and practices of Anthroposophy and its three key concepts: the Four Temperaments; the Seven-Year [development] cycle; and the Twelve Senses. Participants identified key features of Waldorf education: holistic development of the child; nature relatedness; modelling and imitation; and contextualisation and localisation. Many features of Waldorf education ran counter to significant values and practices in schooling in the local culture. The paper indicates how to reconcile these, and makes recommendations for further research.

This article reports a case study of older adults learning English in China. It indicates how, founded on consequentialist ethics, risk analysis, and safeguarding, it was decided to use covert research, drawing on the confluence of risk analysis, risk evaluation, risk management, safeguarding, research ethics, and important contextual and cultural features. Ethical principles of nonmaleficence, beneficence, safeguarding, and protection were addressed, and account was taken of the strength, likelihood, and consequences of risks, safeguards, and benefits, informed by Chinese cultural contexts, values, behaviors, and features of teaching and learning based on andragogy and geragogy. Implications are drawn for teaching and learning with older adults, advocating significant account to be taken of contextual factors.

ABSTRACT Conceptual replications have received increased coverage in the educational research agenda. This article argues for clarity in, and justification of, the definition, scope, and boundaries of a conceptual replication and what it can and cannot do. It argues for clear justifications when changing components from those of the original study. The article raises issues concerning internal validity and construct validity which arise from the elision of replication with applicability and generalisability in a conceptual replication, and questions how far the “concept” needs, and can obtain, greater separation from context. It indicates limits to the power of conceptual replications to falsify and verify the original study, and argues for greater specificity, precision, accuracy, and attention to contexts, conditions, and causality and their influence on outcomes. Implications are drawn for preparing, planning, conducting, analysing, judging, and reporting “fair” conceptual replications in education, identifying 10 “rules” for a fair conceptual replication.

Providing an overview of key issues in theory and practice, Replication Research in Education is designed to identify and discuss the benefits and challenges facing replication studies in education. Both clear and practical, this groundbreaking volume covers how to introduce, develop, conduct, report, and discuss these studies, and the issues they raise for policy and practice. Bridging theory and practice, this book considers what replication research should look like, how it should be conducted, and how to judge when it has been successful. It enables researchers to plan and conduct studies successfully, from their earliest stages through to completion. This key text: brings together in a single volume, existing issues, claims and counterclaims, discourses, and practices of replication; introduces, covers, and extends this field of research, indicating its possibilities and limits; expands and adds to existing discussions and practices; will enable researchers to design, conduct, evaluate, and critique studies. The comprehensive and exhaustive coverage of issues and practices within Replication Research in Education make it a 'must read' for all novice and experienced educational researchers who are considering, conducting, and reviewing replication studies in education.

The search for reliable and valid evidence from research in education concerning the “truth” of a matter is neither easy nor straightforward. What can we safely take from research findings? What kinds of studies can yield the most reliable and valid evidence? Do we go for close-grained detail or an overall generalization? How selective and biased are we in sifting through evidence and what it tells us? How much do we project our own tastes onto data and our interpretation of the messages coming from them? How can we overcome bias? The opening pages of Silver’s volume The Signal and the Noise (2012) include a disturbing and potentially disruptive comment. He argues that we live in an age when information floods out faster than we can cope with, and so, to survive, we look at it selectively and subjectively, mindless of the “distortions” of the “truth” that such behaviour risks (p. 17). Silver’s message reinforces Kahneman’s (2011) Thinking Fast and Slow, in which Kahneman indicates that, whilst “humans are not irrational” (p. 411), they often need help in making more accurate and rational judgements, decisions, and choices. We tend to see what we want to see, and we quietly, subconsciously look for information that will support our preconceptions and preferences, even if this contradicts what the evidence is actually telling us. None of this is new; consider Jane Austen’s quip in her novel Persuasion: “How quick come the reasons for approving what we like” (Austen, 1818/1993, p. 12). It is easy to mistake the “truth”. Add to this phenomenon Silver’s (2012) comment that the “truth” is the “signal” which arises out of the “noise”, whilst “noise” is that which “distracts us” from such “truth” (p. 17). “Noise” comprises contextual material and, indeed, research methods. But in the variable-dense, highly contingent, setting-specific, context-rich, conditional, and person-dependent world of education, how acceptable is it to consign contexts to being somehow separate, separable from, or somehow lesser than “signals” and “truths”. What if the reverse of Silver’s claim turns out to be the “truth”, and that, in reality, contextual “noise” is actually the “signal” that we should accept? How rational is it to seek and separate the “signal” from contextual “noise” in educational research? Surely research in education includes context as part of the “signal”? There is a compelling argument that suggests that research findings in education are, and should be, inescapably and symbiotically, constitutionally, wedded to context, contextually rooted in it and referenced to it. As the review of Biesta’s (2020) book Educational Research: An Unorthodox Introduction notes in this issue, researchers in education must “recover the constituent features of educational aspects of educational research: what makes educational research specifically educational”. Moreover, the conjectural nature of science makes it clear that what happens to come out of the “noise” of specific pieces of research – the “signal” – is neither incontrovertible nor an absolute “truth”. The provisional nature of scientific “truth” (qua the best that we currently know) is only a tentative, preferably evidence-informed “best bet” (Major & Higgins, 2019). Can and should decontextualized research data in education release educationists from the mire of contexts? Should we go for the small-scale, high granularity

There is a recent surge in the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) within education globally, with disproportionate claims being made about what they show, ‘what works’, and what constitutes the best ‘evidence’. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship from across the world, Taming Randomized Controlled Trials in Education critically addresses the increased use of RCTs in education, exploring their benefits, limits and cautions, and ultimately questioning the prominence given to them. While acknowledging that randomized controlled trials do have some place in education, the book nevertheless argues that this place should be limited. Drawing together all arguments for and against RCTs in a comprehensive and easily accessible single volume, the book also adds new perspectives and insights to the conversation; crucially, the book considers the limits of their usefulness and applicability in education, raising a range of largely unexplored concerns about their use. Chapters include discussions on: The impact of complexity theory and chaos theory. Design issues and sampling in randomized controlled trials. Learning from clinical trials. Data analysis in randomized controlled trials. Reporting, evaluating and generalizing from randomized controlled trials. Considering key issues in understanding and interrogating research evidence, this book is ideal reading for all students on Research Methods modules, as well as those interested in undertaking and reviewing research in the field of education.

The opening pages of Pearl and Mackenzie’s volume The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (2018) herald their captivating romp through causality by referring to a “ladder of causation” (p. 28) that starts from association (by seeing and observing), moves up to intervention (by doing and intervening), and thence to counterfactuals (by imagining, retrospection, and understanding). Each rung of the ladder establishes causality more certainly. Humans think causally. Causality can be studied by many methods. Here, Pearl and Mackenzie (2018) state that statistical analysis does not simply concern data and their methods of analysis; rather, there is a need for an “understanding of the process that produces the data” (p. 85). Such “understanding” comes from introducing causality, as causality yields something additional to the original data. “Methods” of data analysis are informed by an “understanding” of causality, as this Editorial shows. Pearl and Mackenzie write that if we remove the understanding of causation from statistical analysis, all that we are left with is data reduction, which does not tell us much. The papers in this issue move forward from “methods” to “understanding” data with regard to causality. Further, the Editorial indicates how easily it is to find expressions of causality in articles; this should caution researchers to take care in the wording that they use. The Editorial below draws attention to wording in deliberately italicising causal words in quoting from the articles in this issue. For example, is causality really being demonstrated, or, like Pearl and MacKenzie’s lowest rung of the ladder, is there merely association? Causality, be it post hoc or ante hoc, is self-evidently important in education. However, how we adduce causality is far from straightforward, and the papers in this issue yield insights into, and cautions concerning, claims for, and demonstrations of, causality. The papers here indicate methods, challenges, outcomes, and benefits of studying causality. The challenges of “methods” and “understanding” when investigating causality are legion. Witness, for example, in the perennial search for causality, its differences from association, prediction, explanation, inference, influence, correlation, accounting for, correspondence to, purposiveness, and a whole armoury of other words. Look at the dangers of working with mediating, confounding, and moderating variables, transitivity, or controlling out almost everything such that what remains is very little. Wrestle with underdetermination, overdetermination, supervenience, and the difficulties of mereology. Consider the challenges of probabilistic causation and Bayesian approaches, leavened by multilevel causal modelling. Add to these the context-dense, variable-rich, causally complex world of education, and the attraction of Pearl and MacKenzie’s (2018) “childlike simplicity” (p. 39) of a causal diagram evaporates in front of our eyes. Little wonder it is, then, that authors studying causality in the field of education choose their words very carefully. This helps them to avoid charges of assumed or

This paper reports a longitudinal case study of developing, implementing, and evaluating group work in a Chinese school in Macau, and instances the salience of Chinese cultural dimensions of schools, teachers, and students in understanding and developing group work in the Chinese school in question. It analyses group work in a case study school and finds that challenges in developing group work in the school are similar to those reported in non-Chinese schools, whilst, at the same time, embracing key aspects of Chinese culture. Group work here challenges one-sided interpretations of "the Chinese learner" and embraces both individualism and collectivism, collaboration and competition, and academic priorities and social priorities. Several elements of Chinese culture, pedagogical culture, and everyday contexts combine compatibly in understanding group work in this Chinese school.

This book is a volume in which, without offence to the poet Yeats, “the ceremony of innocence is drowned”. Like it or not, educational research is inescapably not innocent; it is embedded in, and c...

Many years ago, the late internationally renowned UK educationist, Harvey Goldstein, gave a thrilling keynote lecture on assessment. He calmly, politely, andwith surgical skill, wielded his intellectual scalpel with dazzling flashes of compelling brilliance, dissecting out and demolishing the then UK government’s policy on assessment in UK schools. It was a model of its kind. He set out, analysed, evaluated, critiqued, and judged the policy. He exposed its assumptions, aporias, and underlying ideology, implications, and consequences, drawing on a range of research evidence, weighing up its pros and cons, and leaving it all in ruins on the dissecting table, to the delight and spontaneous applause of the audience. Working like a filigree jeweller, he exposed it for what it was: dogma wrapped up in high-sounding, pejorative phrases. His forecast of consequences came true. By taking a sober, cool, unemotional, dispassionate, careful, perfectly paced, and measured analysis, he enabled his scalpel to do its work, step by step, and it worked wonders. There were no histrionics or one-sided statements. Instead, he let the argument speak for itself. In Habermasian style, the unforced force of the argument prevailed, drawing on a wealth of research evidence where relevant, generating light rather than the heat of a furnace of emotional noise, and persuading by the force of the argument alone, not its temperature. The deeper that Goldstein went into his analysis, the clearer it became that here was a topic – assessment in UK schools – whose features were complex rather than simple, unstraightforward rather than easily understood, multitextured, multidimensional, and multilevelled, a contested ideological terrain in many dimensions and levels, and not to be taken at face value. His analysis was an example par excellence of how researchers in education should operate, indicating not only that they have a duty to expose and unravel the complexity of an issue but also how to do it. The four papers in this issue illustrate the importance of researchers in education opening up and analysing their fields closely and carefully, exposing the complexities of the issues with which they are working, what their evidence suggests, and what are the boundaries of what can be taken from their research. This is their task, whatever fields of focus, methodologies, and methods they employ. For example, in this issue, Cunningham, Gorman, and Maher report action research using observational approaches to study student engagement, noting that “student engagement is a multidimensional and complex phenomenon”, and they indicate the limits of their research as being “too small to draw conclusive conclusions”. Kim and Lee, using survey data from the Measures of Effective Teaching project, conduct multilevel regression analysis to measure teacher effectiveness. They employ a value-added model that moves beyond averages and takes account of variance in teachers, in the name of equity in recognising differences amongst students. They are careful to include “limitations and caveats”, and they recognise the “limitations regarding the instrument for measuring teaching practices for educational equity”.

This is an important book. It turns “what works” into “what is actually working”. Its chapters, from a wide range of authors, address the stinging criticism from Gorard, See, and Siddiqui that “muc...

In the "what works" agenda, the case for replication studies in education has strong proponents and supporting arguments. This paper outlines some of their key claims and argues that replication studies, whilst potentially making an important contribution to the "what works" and evidence-based agenda, and education more widely, face several challenges in the context-dense, variable-rich field of education. The paper indicates key challenges facing replication studies in education, from definitions to conception, conduct, interpreting, and drawing conclusions from findings. It sets out how replication studies in education might be improved and developed, and how to address challenges. What replications bring to education is important and useful, but exacting, and, like other research in education, they are not straightforward. Changes of mind-set of researchers, publishers, and funders are needed in order to enable replication studies to prosper, together with attention to what constitutes valid and reliable replication.

Many and wide are the efforts to gain some purchase on “what works” in education and to make sure that research impacts on bringing improvements to educational practices and policies. How can resea...

When Oscar Wilde wrote that “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”, he could hardly have envisaged the arrival on the scene of “impact” being judged by how many ci...