EDITOR’S NOTE: Identifying An Education Research Study’s Limitations

Discipline-based science education research studies face many limitations. One is that study-participants are human beings and apt to be inconsistent in how they respond to educational interventions—even high quality and highly effective ones. The second is that researchers themselves are human and well poised to use study designs and data analysis approaches that yield the most desired results. In the end, simply having “too small a sample size” is a short-sighted limitation. It is author’s intellectually pursuing the full range of possible limitations of a study that new insights and new experimental designs can be intellectually created. The discussion of limitations should bring forth ideas and next steps pathways for researchers to follow, making articles more of a conversation and intellectual stimulation of a research trajectory rather than an abrupt ending to a study.