Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Commons^™

Stories We Don’T Tell: Research’S Limited Accounting Of Rural Schools, Michael Thier, Paul Beach

School Leadership Review

To help build capacity among PK-12 school leaders and policymakers whose decisions can impact rural settings, often without full understanding of the nuances most salient to rural places, this study asked (1) To what extent do education researchers account for geographic locale in their reporting? (2) Do highly ranked journals account for geographic locale in their reporting more readily than education research in general? Hybridizing three systematic approaches to literature review—rapid, mapping, and scoping—the study examined a population-level dataset of nearly 109,000 school-focused, peer-reviewed articles in ERIC during a 10-year period and dove deeper into 4,001 articles from highly ranked …