The nature of the evidence assembled

Publication Summary

This chapter discusses the conduct of education research, as well as some methodological innovations that have been proposed and used. A simple general approach to research is described; including a ‘sieve’, or a set of criteria, used to assist in the estimation of trustworthiness of any research study and the number of counterfactual cases needed to disturb a finding (NNTD). The chapter describes these and other innovations to generate evidence used in the following chapters; such as the mean absolute deviation and the Gorard segregation index. Furthermore, it presents an outline of additional research methods used in the following chapters.