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

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.