Educational Researcher

Educational Researcher is one of a number of journals published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA). It is unique among AERA journals, however, for at least three reasons. First, it is the only AERA-published journal that is sent to all members of the association. Second, because all members of AERA receive the journal, it is used by the association to communicate various sorts of association business to members of the association. Every May, for example, [Page 317]the “Call for Proposals” for papers and sessions to be presented at the following year's association meeting is printed in the Educational Researcher. Finally, the Educational Researcher does not normally publish studies, per se, or even traditional literature reviews. Rather, the preferred genre in this publication is something akin to the essay.

Each issue of the Educational Researcher is divided into three sections. The first section contains what are referred to as feature articles. These articles normally run from 5,000 to 7,000 words. A second section labeled “Research News and Comments” contains somewhat briefer and more narrowly focused discussions of policy issues and controversies that either directly or indirectly impact the practice of educational research. The final section contains conventional book reviews and essays that review related works of different authors or of a single author's line of research. The Educational Researcher has served as a forum in which some of the field's most disputed questions are debated. During the final quarter of the 20th century, for instance, when advocates of quantitative and qualitative research methods were waging the so-called paradigm wars, the pages of the Educational Researcher frequently were used to debate a whole range of methodology-related questions.

In a landmark Educational Researcher article, for instance, Sandra Mathison demonstrated why qualitative researchers' notion of triangulation should not be thought of as a synonym for quantitative researchers' concept of reliability. Similarly, Alan Peshkin, in another issue of the Educational Researcher, presented a compelling case for thinking of qualitative researchers' subjectivity as a potential asset rather than as an inevitable liability in the inquiry process. Years later, as the 20th century was nearing an end, a newly named features editor, Robert Donmoyer, published an Educational Researcher article that explored issues related to editing an association journal in a para-digmatically diverse field such as education.

During the first decade of the 21st century, the Educational Researcher has continued to function as a forum in which members of the educational research community can debate important research-related issues. A 21st-century controversy that has received considerable attention on the pages of the Educational Researcher, for instance, is the one ignited by the publication of the National Research Council's (NRC) report, Scientific Research in Education, a report that defined scientific research quite narrowly. Educational researchers who were displeased with the report's definition often articulated their displeasure in scholarly articles published in the Educational Researcher. The journal also published responses to critiques of the NRC report—as well as complete articles—by those responsible for the report.

Undoubtedly, the Educational Researcher will continue to serve as a forum in which research-related issues can be debated. In this era of blogs and online message boards, this sort of forum may seem less important than it used to be. Still, there should always be a place for debates built around well-crafted papers in which arguments are carefully rendered and precisely made. At its best, this is what the Educational Researcher is about.

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