This paper discusses journalists’ vast misunderstanding, underestimation and ignorance of the nature of statistics and their role in shaping the public’s daily work and life. In countering what the authors see as the most common myths about numbers and the news, it aims to set the scene for the key issues and debates that this special issue covers. At the centre of this discussion are three key points: (a) statistics are not distant from the news: they are at the heart of journalism; (b) statistics are not mathematics: they are about the application of the same kind of logical and valid reasoning needed for other types of news material; and (c) statistics are neither cold nor boring: they are an endless source of inspiration for much excellent journalism in the past, present and, undoubtedly, future.
In the field of education research, mixed methods have traditionally referred to the combination of quantitative and qualitative data that brings us closer to ‘reality’. However, recent literature on social and educational studies has increasingly incorporated works that integrate digital technologies and mixed methods. This novelty provides an opportunity to re-examine original contributions in the field, particularly in relation to educational innovation. Therefore, the objective of this article is to analyze the characteristics and the trends of new contributions from researchers in education. To achieve this, we carried out a systematic literature review (SLR) of 311 articles published from January 2010 to January 2020 in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. We worked with nine questions that explored three key themes: characteristics, technologies and designs within the realm of educational innovation. The validation for this analysis was achieved using a criterion adopted by scholars at York University, which incorporates: inclusion and exclusion, relevance and description of data, as well as peer review in the analysis. Our findings indicate that networks of co-terms, identification of educational innovations and the types of designs -currently applied in educational innovation- as well as the adoption of a mixed-method approach seem to be much better suited to underpin the required combination of strategies and processes that are interwoven in order to address the complexity of the education phenomenon in our times.
En el ámbito de la investigación, los métodos mixtos usan combinadamente datos cuantitativos y cualitativos para un acercamiento con la «realidad». En la literatura reciente de los estudios sociales y educativos, se ubica un crecimiento de publicaciones que integran tecnologías digitales y métodos mixtos y, con ello, se presenta la oportunidad de generar un aporte original de posibilidades para investigar la innovación educativa. El objetivo de este artículo fue analizar las características de estos estudios y las tendencias de nuevas contribuciones para la educación. Para lograrlo se realizó una revisión sistemática de literatura (SLR) de 311 artículos publicados, de enero 2010 a enero 2020, en las bases de datos Web of Science (WoS) y Scopus. Se trabajó con nueve preguntas que exploraron tres temas: características, tecnologías y diseños con líneas de innovación educativa. La validación se dio con los criterios de la Universidad de York: inclusión y exclusión, pertinencia y descripción de datos, así como evaluación de pares en el análisis. Los hallazgos dan cuenta de redes de co-términos, identificación de innovaciones educativas y tipos de diseños que están siendo trabajados en líneas de investigación de innovación educativa. Se concluye que el enfoque de métodos mixtos aporta con una combinación interceptadas de estrategias y procesos para abordar la complejidad del fenómeno de la educación, con compresión holística, interdisciplinar y cambio en la forma de hacer investigación en nuestros tiempos.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.