SAGE Handbook for Research in Education

The SAGE Handbook for Research in Education: Pursuing Ideas as the Keystone of Exemplary Inquiry, edited by Clifton F. Conrad and Ronald C. Serlin stimulates and encourages students, faculty, and educational practitioners, including individuals in Pre K–16 education, government, and the private sector who conduct applied and policy-oriented educational research, to place the pursuit of ideas at the epicenter of their research—from framing meaningful problems to identifying and addressing key challenges to the reporting and dissemination of their findings. As well as supporting readers to place the pursuit of ideas as the keystone of exemplary inquiry, the Handbook draws on the perspectives of scholars representing diverse fields within the field of education—from pre-kindergarten to elementary and secondary school to higher education—as well as qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches to inquiry. The chapters are punctuated throughout by the voices of authors who wrestle with the formidable challenges of framing and conducting and reporting meaningful inquiry.

Clifton F. Conrad has been Professor of Higher Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1987. He previously taught at the University of Denver (1975-1977), The College of William and Mary (1977-1981), and the University of Arizona (1981-1987)—where he also served as a Department Chair and as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. His research program is centered on college and university curriculum—at the undergraduate and graduate levels, in the liberal arts and sciences as well as in professional fields. Books that he has authored or co-authored include The Undergraduate Curriculum, A Silent Success: Master′s Education in the United States, and Emblems of Quality in Higher Education: Developing and Sustaining High-Quality Programs. While he has published quantitative studies in journals such as the American Educational Research Journal and the Journal of Education Finance, the majority of his research has been fueled by qualitative approaches to inquiry—work that appears in journals ranging from Sociology of Education to the Journal of Higher Education. A former President of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, since 1980 he has been a key expert witness and consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Office of Civil Rights (U.S. Department of Education) in major civil rights cases and inquiries involving race and gender in higher education in nine states. Two of these cases led to landmark decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, including one in which his scholarship was cited approvingly. Ronald C. Serlin is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches courses in nonparametric statistics and the philosophy of science and statistics. His mastery in teaching earned him a Chancellor′s Distinguished Teaching Award early in his career. His expertise as a statistical consultant has led to long and fruitful collaborative efforts with colleagues in the School of Nursing and the Departments of Neurology, Art Education, and Journalism & Mass Communication, among others. Currently, he is engaged in two major lines of research. One examines the effects of violations of assumptions on known and proposed parametric and nonparametric tests, a knowledge of which helps to increase the validity of statistical conclusions. The other investigates the philosophical underpinnings of statistical hypothesis testing, an effort linking modern philosophy of science and statistical practice to delineate the role of statistics in the scientific endeavor. He has published regularly in Psychological Bulletin and Psychological Methods and in such wide-ranging journals as the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Research in Music Education, and Pain. An article he co-authored won the Annual Research Report award competition for Division D of the American Educational Research Association. He won an award for Outstanding Contributions to Nursing Education, and recently he won a School of Education Distinguished Achievement Award. He served three nonconcurrent terms as Department Chair.