The authors examined the methodologies of articles in teaching-and-learning research journals, published in 1994 and in 2004, and classified them as either intervention (based on researcher-manipulated variables) or nonintervention. Consistent with the findings of Hsieh et al., intervention research articles declined from 45% in 1994 to 33% in 2004. For nonintervention articles, the authors recorded the incidence of “causal” statements (e.g., if teachers/schools/parents did X, then student/child outcome Y would likely result). Nonintervention research articles containing causal statements increased from 34% in 1994 to 43% in 2004. It appears that at the same time intervention studies are becoming less prevalent in the teaching-and-learning research literature, researchers are more inclined to include causal statements in nonintervention studies.
The majority of studies included adults (age 18 and older) as participants, administered brief (less than 1 day) interventions, assessed intervention effects immediately following the intervention, and did not report treatment integrity. Most studies included multiple outcome measures and exhibited an increase in effect-size reporting from 4% in 1995 to 61% in 2004. The percentage of total articles based on randomized experiments decreased over the 21-year period in both the educational psychology journals (from 40% in 1983 to 34% in 1995 to 26% in 2004) and AERJ (from 33% to 17% to 4%). Limitations of the study and future research issues are discussed.
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