Writing Education Research

Guidelines for Publishable Scholarship

Joy Egbert, Sherry Sanden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317634478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For both new academics and those with some experience, writing articles of publishable quality can be particularly challenging. Developing the necessary skill set requires useful information, hard work, and the type of direction infrequently offered in research methods courses, leaving researchers to piece together resources on their own. This book addresses this critical topic in a format that is easy to teach and understand. It is a practical volume that teaches researchers how to identify their audience, clearly state the nature of their work, provide exceptional literature reviews, cite appropriately, and explicate their research.

Beginning each chapter with reviewer comments, Writing Education Research is designed to help scholars understand both how to write effective research reports and how to get published. Practice exercises and resource lists in each chapter offer easy-to-access information about the review and publication process. A perfect accompaniment to standard research courses, this practical book demystifies the writing process for anyone looking to publish articles, chapters, or papers in education.

1
Writing and Publishing in Education

Overview

This chapter introduces the following topics:

• Effective education research reporting
• Assumptions about submitted manuscripts
• The structure of a research article

Effective Education Research Reporting

Writers of research—which, in this text, includes empirical, conceptual, theoretical, and practical scholarship—must be able to develop manuscripts that meet guidelines for effective reporting in order to publish. Developing such publishable education manuscripts is essential to the dissemination of the important work conducted by researchers in the field. According to the American Educational Research Association (AERA), education research is

a field of inquiry aimed at advancing knowledge of education and learning processes and development of the tools and methods necessary to support this endeavor. Education researchers aim to describe, understand, and explain how learning takes place throughout the life cycle and how formal and informal processes of education affect learning, attainment, and the capacity to lead productive lives. Scholarship in this arena is undertaken at the individual, situational, institutional, and social structural levels of analysis. The unifying purpose for education research is to build cumulative and sound knowledge about human and social process of fundamental significance to individuals, to groups, and to the larger society.

(AERA, 2013)

This text explains and provides guidelines for preparing a scholarly manuscript that is of publishable quality. It focuses on the structures and language within research manuscripts that allow them to be comprehensible and useful in explaining researchers’ models, theories, and studies. Failure to appropriately attend to the areas and topics that comprise these structural features is a central reason that manuscripts are rejected for publication. The goal for this book, then, is to explain how these features can reinforce the overall message of a manuscript and to demonstrate how to construct manuscripts that use these structural features to support rather than hinder that message. We hope this will improve the quality of research reports created for publication and reduce the large number of ineffectively executed manuscripts submitted to (and ultimately rejected from) journals, committees, and conferences.

Although surface feature errors are one of the major complaints commented on by manuscript reviewers, many good texts exist that examine discrete surface-level items such as punctuation and correct APA style (see, for example, any of the references in the recommended resources at the end of this chapter). Therefore, this text does not address surface features. On the other hand, few texts take on the specific concepts and structures that useful, well-presented articles and chapters contain. These concepts and structures include, for example, explaining previous research in the literature review rather than just including citations; integrating the theoretical framework as support throughout the manuscript; providing justification for methodological decisions; and including a limitations section and addressing how and whether the limitations were mediated. These manuscript features provide not only a consistent deep structure for the reader but also signposts so the reader can follow the manuscript’s logic and flow.

Further, this book emphasizes the review process. In addition to providing common ground and helping researchers receive positive editorial reviews for their manuscripts, we also hope to help researchers move through the review process effectively. Having a manuscript accepted with no changes requested by the editor is quite a rare occurrence in many areas. Therefore, researchers need to know how to revise their manuscripts in response to reviewers’ comments, which sometimes can be unclear or unneeded but are more often central to the clarity of the research. This text looks closely at editorial reviews and how to address changes in the manuscript structure and content. By providing actual examples of reviewer comments and related guidelines for how to revise and/or respond, we provide a number of perspectives on text content and structure and a variety of choices authors have in addressing them.

In other words, by briefly defining, discussing, and providing examples of the important components of a publishable research manuscript and the review process, this text both provides novice researchers with a head start to publishing and also reminds experienced researchers of what makes an effective research report. As in our previous text (Egbert & Sanden, 2014), we hope to provide common ground from which to work so that readers and authors understand each other and so that more high-quality research can be published. This goal is crucial to the field not only for those on a tenure track who are required to publish in certain journals but also for “voluntary” researchers looking for a broad audience for their findings and for consumers of research, such as administrators and teachers. With a set of common understandings of what manuscripts should contain, we all will know what to look for and how to evaluate them more evenly.

With that said, however, there are those who will disagree that all of the issues we address in this text are warranted or perhaps argue that there is a thin line between description and prescription that we might cross. This may be so, but the rather generic solutions we provide can be used or not based on the researcher’s choice. We certainly do not begin to suggest that all research manuscripts should look the same, or have the same voice, or use the same vocabulary. We do recommend, however, that the underlying structures and signposts have some consistency, and this is where we focus our attention.

Assumptions About Submitted Manuscripts

Throughout this text, reviewers’ comments start each chapter and section to provide an authentic introduction to the issue under discussion. These excerpts are from reviews that we have received on manuscripts we have prepared and on papers we have reviewed, as well as reviews that have been shared with us. For example, the two comments that follow show some of the issues described in this section.

Reviewer:

The article is very well written, certainly, and it explores in a basic way an important issue; however, I find that this article is more appropriate for a journal that focuses more on applied or “how-to” issues than on original scholarly contributions. It has nothing to do with how the article has been prepared—the author(s) seem to have been meticulous in their preparation; in fact, I think a different journal might accept this article as is. The problem for me is fit with this journal. Typically articles in this journal present a deeper exploration of a topic based on a very well-explicated theoretical framework and stand on their own as a clear step toward understanding the issue under investigation.

Reviewer:

The research reported here has been done many, many times over. We have had these kinds of reports for years, in this and other journals. It’s time to use other, more complementary methods, in order to broaden our understandings.… Although the author feels that something new is being reported, I didn’t see it.

The first review describes a lack of fit, and the second indicates the need for useful content; as we explore writing for publication, these are two of the considerations that we will take for granted because they are covered elsewhere. These are listed and explained in the following, along with other assumptions we make in this text.

Useful Content

“Useful” in this case does not necessarily mean “applied,” but rather it indicates that the research adds new information to the extant literature. Even a replication study, done well, adds to the field; however, if the study has already been replicated to the point where no new knowledge is gained, then it ceases to be useful. We expect, and therefore do not address in this text, that manuscript content is useful for some purpose, whether it is explaining a new concept, outlining a theory in a way not previously done, or exploring an old topic with a new methodology.

Rigorous Conduct

We also assume that if the manuscript reports an empirical study, the research itself was conducted rigorously and is valid and reliable. We expect that, even if missing from the manuscript draft, the important elements of the research were attended to in the study itself. In other words, if the research (empirical, conceptual, or theoretical) was not well conceived in the first place, then the writing probably will not matter in getting it published.

Surface Edits

In addition, we assume that the manuscript is grammatical and that it has been spell-checked and proofread. If the manuscript is not comprehensible to begin with, it will not matter if the relevant content and structures are present, because the reviewer will not be able to tell.

Fit to Journal

Further, we take for granted that the researcher has read the requirements for submitting papers to the journal or book chosen—in other words, that the paper is a fit for the outlet (i.e., that it is appropriate for the journal’s purpose and audience). Not only does content matter to fit, but the forum may also determine issues such as how long each section and the whole paper should be, which type of citations should be used, and how the researcher(s) should refer to themselves (i.e., first or third person).

With 619 international and national academic education journals listed by SCImago Journal and Country Rank (2014) and hundreds more that can be found in other contexts, different journals have different requirements for fit. For example, Teachers College Record requests:

Feature articles are typically full-length papers running thirty pages or more. Both empirical and theoretical papers are considered, but papers that combine well developed theoretical frameworks with careful empirical work are particularly appreciated. Feature articles may contain research, analysis, and commentary. TCR invites submissions utilizing all methods of inquiry, and all topics related to the field of education, broadly conceived, are welcome. Feature articles are considered for both online and print publication. Online features can take advantage of the variety of media made possible through electronic publishing, including the use of audio, video, complex or dynamic graphic displays, interactive sessions, performances, and other means to improve the communication of scholarly work. Features may be presented as a single article or in serial form. (Natriello, 2005)

Contrast this to the submission guidelines from a very different type of journal, ISTE’s Learning and Leading with Technology (found at https://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-leading/submission-guidelines):

We love to publish lively, engaging content that is clear and direct. Please read some of our past articles to get a sense of our tone and style before you submit. We accept several types of content, including:

• How-to articles, 500–1,500 words
• Articl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 Writing and Publishing in Education
• 2 Manuscript Introduction and Purpose
• 3 Review of the Literature and Theoretical Framework
• 4 Research Questions, Participants, and Context
• 5 Data Collection, Data Analysis, and Limitations
• 6 Presenting Results and Discussion
• 7 Writing Conclusions and Implications
• 8 Title, Abstract, and Responding to Reviewers
• APPENDIX
• INDEX