As education librarians seek to collaborate with preservice teacher preparation programs, they need to apply informatics principles to optimize the library’s ultimate impact on student achievement. Specifically, education librarians need to examine several levels of information processing systems: student, faculty, program, institution, and government entities. Furthermore, education librarians need to identify the conditions or environments of these information systems because the infrastructure, available resources, and knowledge base all impact student learning.

This article discusses user information behavior though analysis of demographic factors, academic disciplinary characteristics, and the nature of educational research. Understanding elements of user information behavior will inform the development of a system of education informatics.

Using the “story constellations” version of narrative inquiry, I tell of two schools—Cochrane Academy and Hardy Academy—that evolved from a shared social narrative history and that were given stories of school and stories of reform that had many features in common.

The use of ethnographic methods yields a rich account of various factors that play a crucial role in determining how educational policy is implemented.

The generic qualities of a qualitative doctoral dissertation proposal are discussed in this article, including how they relate to the dissertation and to the nature of a research university. Standard parts of a proposal are discussed and reasons given for the role each plays.

This article argues for the use of qualitative methods in large-scale evaluations. We demonstrate that despite the challenges it presents, the incorporation of qualitative methods significantly improved an evaluation of the Waterford Early Reading Program and translated into findings that were meaningful and useful to stakeholders.

An increasingly broad array of cultural and institutional forces are at work creating a new “common sense” of education that maligns or manipulates the corpus of educational research and attacks promising practices and reforms. In addition, a new type of education scholarship has emerged that is delivered in alternative ways, funded through unorthodox sources, motivated by nonacademic purposes, and supported through direct access to media and political organizations, including the federal government. This article examines the details of the new commonsense policy and rhetoric and considers what is being lost and what educators need to do to restore to public education its position of civic and moral leadership in our society.

This article argues for the importance of replication and data sharing in educational research. Relying on standards set in other disciplines, such as sociology, the paper discusses how professional associations can help to create norms and incentives for data sharing and data archiving.

This special section of Teachers College Record is comprised of papers presented at the National Research Council Workshop on Measuring Racial Disparities and Discrimination in Elementary and Secondary Education.

In this article I seek to answer the question, "When are racial disparities in education the result of racial discrimination?" To answer it I synthesize the social science research on racially correlated disparities in education.

This paper reviews the methodologies most frequently used by social scientists when measuring discrimination in housing and labor markets and assesses their potential usefulness for analyzing discrimination in education.

Many questions remain among both teachers and researchers about the research methods used in teacher research, about how theory is used, about what people are doing when they do it, about the values behind it, and about how it can be best used.

This papers considers concerptual and methodological issues that arise in large-scale survey research on teaching and uses data from Prospects to draw some substantive conclusions about the overall magnitude and sources of teachers' effects on student achievement in elementary schools.

While there has been a great deal of recognition in the business world that information and knowledge management can be vital tools in organizations, it is only recently that educational administrators have begun to look at how they might use information systems to assist in creating effective learning environments. In the business research environment, the evolution from data to information and from information to knowledge plays a leading role in shaping how organizations develop strategies and plans for the future. Using examples from schools, this paper illustrates how knowledge management can enable schools to examine the plethora of data they collect, and how an ecological framework can be used to transform these data into meaningful information.

This paper offers an analysis of Mead’s contributions and contradictions in two sections, one on her ethnography, the other on her legacy applied to the problems of education in the contemporary United States, particularly her rarely noticed contributions to a theory of learning.

Fairness and justice in collaborative authorship practice.

A detailed analysis of a sample first paragraph of a thesis

Advice on beginning a paper

This article identifies and examines the ethical issues surrounding teacher research, especially when the participants of the research are the teachers' own students.

In this article, we examine the ethical and epistemological implications of shifting from a strictly teacher-centered group to include students in a collaborative co-researching experience.

Discusses the importance of teachers and researchers learning to appreciate one another's professional roles to bridge the gap between research and practice. Information comes from meetings between teachers and researchers as part of a three-year study to discover how moral concerns permeate school life.

Examines the shared cognitive dimensions of cultural institutions like museums, libraries, and parks, suggesting they make similar situations for transmitting information. This article encourages a critical understanding of public cultural institutions to enlarge the potential for discourse about their analysis and criticism. Heuristic questions for understanding cultural institutions are presented.

Systematic intentional inquiry by teachers makes accessible some of teachers' expertise and provides universities and schools with unique perspectives on teaching and learning. A four-part working typology of teacher research is proposed, with examples of the four types: journals, essays, oral inquiry processes, and classroom studies.

The author argues that the persistent criticism of teachers and of teacher education programs is due in part to the absence of a "consensus of the learned" about how teachers should be educated. Broudy’s position is that a working consensus could be established through a case-study method in teacher education if cases were developed to portray important problems identified by teachers as typical and recurrent in their professional practice.

This article presents three versions of what may happen in post-1989 research on teaching. In the first version, the quantitative approach dies of wounds inflicted by its critics. In the second, different approaches work in harmony, and in the third, the wars continue among competing approaches to educational research.