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What Does It Mean to Be a Research Journal Editor?
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Research journals play significant roles in the advancement of academic fields of inquiry. This chapter starts with a brief description of the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. Most importantly, this chapter provides practical guides to promoting and disseminating significant research in mathematics education. The guides provided in this chapter will be helpful and insightful for those who are interested in publishing in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education.KeywordsJournal for Research in Mathematics EducationMathematics educationSignificant researchResearch dissemination
Cooney, Shealy, and Arvold (1998) wrote a widely cited article describing the belief structures of prospective teachers and argued that the structures can aid in describing how beliefs change and the influence of authority on the individual. We investigate the impact of this manuscript on the field. To do this, we conducted a literature review (n = 59) of journal articles and proceedings published since 1998 covering the same population and goals of Cooney, Shealy, and Arvold (changing prospective teachers' beliefs) and then conducted an analysis of 101 journal articles citing Cooney, Shealy, and Arvold (1998) to see why the authors cited the piece. We conclude that the impact of Cooney, Shealy, and Arvold's article differs from that of their results and suggest that belief structures should be more carefully investigated by the field.
Although often asked tactfully, a frequent question posed to authors by JRME reviewers is “So what?” Through this simple and well-known question, reviewers are asking: What difference do your findings make? How do your results advance the field? “So what?” is the most basic of questions, often perceived by novice researchers as the most difficult question to answer. Indeed, addressing the “so what” question continues to challenge even experienced researchers. All researchers wrestle with articulating a convincing argument about the importance of their own work. When we try to shape this argument, it can be easy to fall into the trap of making claims about the implications of our findings that reach beyond the data.
In our recent editorials (Cai et al., 2019a, 2019b), we discussed the important roles that research questions and theoretical frameworks play in conceptualizing, carrying out, and reporting mathematics education research. In this editorial, we discuss the methodological choices that arise when one has articulated research questions and constructed at least a rudimentary theoretical framework. Just as the researcher must justify the significance of research questions and the appropriateness of the theoretical framework, we argue that the researcher must thoroughly describe and justify the selection of methods. Indeed, the research questions and the theoretical framework should drive the choice of methods (and not the reverse). In other words, a sufficiently well-specified set of research questions and theoretical framework establish the parameters within which the most productive methods will be selected and developed.
In our March editorial (Cai et al., 2019), we discussed the nature of significant research questions in mathematics education. We asserted that the choice of a suitable theoretical framework is critical to establishing the significance of a research question. In this editorial, we continue our series on high-quality research in mathematics education by elaborating on how a well-constructed theoretical framework strengthens a research study and the reporting of research for publication. In particular, we describe how the theoretical framework provides a connecting thread that ties together all of the parts of a research report into a coherent whole. Specifically, the theoretical framework should help (a) make the case for the purpose of a study and shape the literature review; (b) justify the study design and methods; and (c) focus and guide the reporting, interpretation, and discussion of results and their implications.
In 2002, the National Research Council (NRC) released Scientific Research in Education , a report that proposed six principles to serve as guidelines for all scientific inquiry in education. The first of these principles was to “pose significant questions that can be investigated empirically” (p. 3). The report argued that the significance of a question could be established on a foundation of existing theoretical, methodological, and empirical work. However, it is not always clear what counts as a significant question in educational research or where such questions come from. Moreover, our analysis of the reviews for manuscripts submitted to JRME ¹ suggests that some practical, specific guidance could help researchers develop a significant question or make the case for the significance of a research question when preparing reports of research for publication.
This editorial discusses the critical idea of replication in educational research.
Mathematics educators have been publishing their work in international research journals for nearly 5 decades. How has the field developed over this period? We analyzed the full text of all articles published in Educational Studies 1n Mathematics and the Journalfor Research in Mathematics Education since their foundation. Using Lakatos's (1978) notion of a research programme, we focus on the field's changing theoretical orientations and pay particular attention to the relative prominence of the experimental psychology, constructivist, and sociocultural programmes. We quantitatively assess the extent of the "social turn," observe that the field is currently experiencing a period of theoretical diversity, and identify and discuss the "experimental cliff," a period during which experimental investigations migrated away from mathematics education journals. © 2018 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. All rights reserved.
The authors discussed 2 paths that the mathematics education community should consider with regard to citation-based metrics of journal quality: either working within the system to enhance positioning or resisting or modifying the system itself.
We present the results of 2 studies, a citation-based study and an opinion-based study, that ranked the relative quality of 20 English-language journals that exclusively or extensively publish mathematics education research. We further disaggregate the opinion-based data to provide insights into variations in judgment of journal quality based on geographic location, journal affiliations and publishing records, and experience in the field. We also report factors that survey respondents indicated were important indicators of journal quality. Finally, we compare our results to previous related rankings and conclude by discussing how our results might inform authors, editors, and evaluators in their efforts to publish and recognize quality research in mathematics education.
This is a study of the beliefs and belief structures of 4 preservice secondary mathematics teachers as they progressed through a 4-quarter sequence in mathematics education including student teaching. We considered the notions of centrally and peripherally held beliefs and whether beliefs were held dualistically or contextually. The various ways in which the teachers structured their beliefs helped account for the fact that some beliefs were permeable whereas others were not. The nature of the evidence supporting the teachers' beliefs was considered particularly as that evidence related to the voices of significant others or to what the individuals valued. A scheme for conceptualizing the professional development of preservice teachers is posited.