This quantitative study examines relationships between student performance and student, teacher, teaching, teacher professional development, and school characteristics in the context of a large-scale, top-down, nationwide curriculum and examination reform across multiple science disciplines and different stages of the reform. Levers to improve student performance include teachers’ perceived administrative support, self-efficacy, teaching experience, elements of classroom instruction, and selected aspects of professional development participation.

As social media impact our lives in myriad ways, research on education and social media continues to grow, prompting the need to reflect on where the field should go from here to conduct the most impactful scholarship. Accordingly, this article proposes research directions and approaches that promise to advance this expanding field, grounded in insights from the long history of studying technology in education, including over a decade of research on social media.

This chapter presents an introduction to design-based implementation research (DBIR). We describe the need for DBIR as a research approach that challenges educational researchers and practitioners to transcend traditional research/practice barriers to facilitate the design of educational interventions that are effective, sustainable, and scalable. We examine antecedents to DBIR, including evaluation research, community-based participatory research, design-based research, and implementation research. The four core principles of DBIR are explained: (1) a focus on persistent problems of practice from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives; (2) a commitment to iterative, collaborative design; (3) a concern with developing theory and knowledge related to both classroom learning and implementation through systematic inquiry; and (4) a concern with developing capacity for sustaining change in systems. We close with an overview of the chapters contained in this NSSE Yearbook on DBIR and explain how each chapter contributes to the overall development of the DBIR approach.

To make technology more useful to schools and more valuable in students' learning, it is important that we (1) reframe how we think about teaching and learning, and (2) get serious about teacher learning and professional development.