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The Incidence of "Causal" Statements in Teaching-and-Learning Research Journals

University of Texas, Austin

Joel R. Levin

University of Arizona

Greg D. Thomas, Keenan A. Pituch and Sharon Vaughn

University of Texas, Austin

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.

Key Words: randomized trials • causal statements • causal conclusions • intervention research • causation

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