Guest Editorial ... Learning to Frame Research in Mathematics Education

Learning how to frame research is arguably the most important capacity for new researchers to develop. This is true both for doctoral students and for junior faculty as they establish research programs at new institutions and begin to help students conduct their own research. I take framing research to mean the construction of connections among research questions, the literature(s) within which those questions are positioned, theoretical perspectives or frameworks, and methods that generate warrants sufficient for making convincing claims. Making strong connections among all of these components is essential for building coherent arguments at the center of high quality research in mathematics education (Lesh, Lovitts, & Kelly, 2000; Simon, 2004). Examples of important contributions to our field that have relied on innovative combinations of questions, theoretical perspective, and methods include Schoenfeld’s (1985) work on problem solving and Steffe’s (e.g., Steffe, 2001; Steffe, von Glasersfeld, Richards, & Cobb, 1983) work on children’s construction of whole and rational numbers. Some recent publications have suggested that doctoral programs in education may not always be producing graduates with the necessary capacities for framing research. Boote and Beile (2005) sampled 30 dissertations from three state-funded colleges of education in the United States, found a wide range in the quality of the literature reviews, and reported that some of the literature reviews were little more than “disjointed summaries of a haphazard collection of literature” (Boote & Beile, 2005, p. 9). Moreover, weak literature reviews may be just part of a larger challenge for new researchers: Schoenfeld (1999) asserted that beginning researchers often do not learn what it means to make and justify claims about educational phenomena or how to frame workable research problems. Part of the challenge is that framing research is a creative process for which there are no formulae. I struggled in graduate school to understand how authors came to pose the questions with which they began published articles and wondered if I would ever be able to articulate such questions. Perhaps others have had similar experiences. The purposes of the present article are to help doctoral students construct initial images of processes involved in framing research and to serve as a catalyst for reflection among junior faculty who, like me, are learning to support students conducting their own research. I will do this by describing how I framed my own dissertation study at a level of detail often omitted or left tacit in published articles. My dissertation was based on detailed analyses of videotaped interviews, but I hope my general points will help others to embark on other kinds of research projects as well.