Steps in dealing with Educational Research:

1. Penetrate Jargon

Unfortunately every sub-field has its own collection of terms that make searching publication indexes all but impossible. Words like teacher quality are laden with different sorts of meaning, dependent on their:

2. Sub-field/Discipline

Anthropology, sociology, history, psychology all have significant stakes in educational research. Their methods differ as much as their

3. Theoretical Frameworks

Whatever the researcher believes about the purpose of their work along with their disciplinary baggage plays a huge part in the eventual

4. Political Usages

Too often, I find myself able to predict the results of a study based upon the name at the top; little effort seems to be made to render judgments anything but black or white, leaving me to question the

5. Problematic Annotations

As far as I can tell, the standard for making declarations within papers is different from other areas. I know I sound like a snotty historian, but many times I have found myself very excited over a footnote which supposedly contains just what I need, only to find the study referenced to be barely relevant. It is as if, as least some of the time, there is an accepted discourse around certain topics that allows a footnote to credential an opinion...

Ellen Lagemann in an introduction to a compilation of essays on educational research, offers the following areas:

Purposes:

Problems:

Settings:

Investigators:

Methods: