This editorial discusses the critical idea of replication in educational research.

Many studies in mathematics education research occur with a nonrepresentative sample and are never replicated. To challenge this paradigm, the author designed a large-scale study evaluating student conceptions in group theory that surveyed a national, representative sample of students. The author illustrates the potential of replication studies to refine theory and theoretical propositions in 3 ways: by offering alternate interpretations of student responses, by challenging previous pedagogical implications, and by reevaluating connections between theories.

Elementary prospective school teachers (PSTs) often struggle to understand why they need to relearn the mathematics that they think they already know. In this set of replication studies, the author addresses this struggle in 3 ways: By increasing and varying the participant pool; by introducing, validating, and examining the effect of using a survey instead of interviews; and showing an interview designed to help PSTs assess their own knowledge accurately correlates with more sophisticated conceptions at the end of the course. The author posits that such an interview could be used to help PSTs learn the mathematics that they need to teach.

The authors wish to better understand the developmental effect of mathematics teacher expectations on future student achievement. Results indicate that students’ experiences with teacher expectations from 1 time point to the next are not significantly associated with one another, but their association with future student achievement grows over time. Teacher expectancy effects in mathematics are stronger for White girls, minority girls, and minority boys than they are for White boys. Implications for teaching are discussed.

In this Research Commentary, the author explores what is meant by “teaching for understanding” and delves into these questions: How does teaching for understanding interact with the backgrounds of the students who experience it or the attributes of the contexts in which they learn? Which empirical findings are context dependent, and which are mere statistical artifacts? 

This Research Commentary explores why interest among researchers in replication studies may be surging.

The authors present two sets of replication studies and aim to confirm, refute, and expand prior work.

The author responds to comments made by Alan Schoenfeld (2018) and Jon Star (2018) in their commentaries on replication studies in the January 2018 issue of JRME. The author posits that replication studies are undervalued because they not only, by definition, recreate past research but, perhaps, also bring into question another scholar’s expertise.