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Action research in education has gained increasing attention in the past 20 years. It is viewed as a practical yet systematic research method that enables teachers to investigate their own teaching and their students’ learning. However, the ethical issues unique to this form of insider research have received less attention. Drawing on several professional associations’ principles for research practice, the authors identify a series of potential ethical issues inherent in action research in K–12 schools and the corresponding difficulties that action researchers encounter with the policies and procedures of institutional review boards. The authors conclude with recommendations for future practice addressed to three groups: institutional review boards, K–12 school professionals and teacher educators, and national professional and representative organizations.

Educational psychology as a field of study has encountered a lack of distinction by overlapping with other fields of study or disciplines. Consequently, educational psychology continues to have difficulty claiming jurisdiction over bodies of research knowledge and has been encroached upon by other more crystallized disciplines. The purpose of this study is to examine the research literature published across top-ranked educational psychology journals to identify the common ground and current trends in research content and to identify those areas that can be reclaimed by the discipline as its own. Overall, 758 articles published in six journals from January 2003 through December 2007 were included in this study. A combination of statistics-based and linguistics-based methods were used to determine how frequently terms occur in the data and establishing a semantic network which created a probabilistic analysis of the co-occurrence of terms resulting in a constellation of terms showing the relationship and relative importance of the categories of terms. The results showed a consistency of research categories suggesting that in spite of reports to the contrary, there is a collective agreement among educational psychologists demonstrated by the empirical research in the field. Keywords Educational psychology . Citation analysisAcademic research journals serve an important function within and across scholarly disciplines. Journals offer scholars a forum where they can communicate ideas, stimulate discussion, and share information in the form of empirical research findings, thoughtful literature reviews, and academic essays. They are the barometers of change, indicating shifts of theoretical, ontological, or epistemological trends. Research journals document the historical influences and shifts within a discipline and define a field of study.As compendia of research, lack of attention to specific areas in the core literature suggests that those in the field are not being made aware of certain aspects of their

Objective. To evaluate the success of a teaching certificate program by qualitatively evaluating the content and extent of participants' reflections. Methods. Two investigators independently identified themes within midpoint and final reflection essays across six program years. Each essay was evaluated to determine the extent of reflection in prompted teaching-related topic areas (strengths, weaknesses, assessment, feedback). Results. Twenty-eight themes were identified within 132 essays. Common themes encompassed content delivery, student assessment, personal successes, and challenges encountered. Deep reflection was exhibited, with 48% of essays achieving the highest level of critical reflection. Extent of reflection trended higher from midpoint to final essays, with significant increases in the strengths and feedback areas. Conclusion. The teaching certificate program fostered critical reflection and self-reported positive behavior change in teaching, thus providing a high-quality professional development opportunity. Such programs should strongly consider emphasizing critical reflection through required reflective exercises at multiple points within program curricula.

The primary question regarding prescriptive appropriateness is a difficult one to answer for the qualitative researcher. While there are certainly qualitative researchers who have offered prescriptive protocols to better define and describe the terrain of qualitative research design and there are qualitative researchers who offer research conclusions that might be considered prescriptive by the reader, the nature of qualitative research tends to avoid the prescriptive statement in the research findings. Instead, a transparent process of research design, theoretical framework application or construction, participant population/ sample identification, and data collection/analysis are revealed throughout the research manuscript leading not to prescriptive findings but rather to asserted outcomes that are carefully communicated to the reader within the context of the research design and experience.Keywords Qualitative assertions . Qualitative evidence . Trustworthiness of qualitative findings When the editors of this special issue framed the question "When is it acceptable to make prescriptive statements in educational research articles?", they were not framing a debate between those who do qualitative research and those who do quantitative research, but rather as a discourse around the different ways of considering the rules of evidence associated with diverse frameworks of knowledge. In quantitative research, issues of power,