Review of Research in Education, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page vii-xxviii, March 2024.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 1-27, March 2024.
There have been countless efforts to improve academic achievement in public schools across the United States, especially in urban school districts. Few efforts, however, use rigorous analytic modeling tools to anticipate and prevent the potential side effects of change. This chapter proposes the application of system dynamics on educational reform efforts by offering a conceptual model, literature review, and research agenda to identify and mitigate the potential side effects of reform. The model is based on interviews and workshops with public school leaders, teachers, and parents in a midsized midwestern urban city. We identify a “capability trap” that may lead to policy resistance with educational reforms. Limitations to this approach are noted, and future areas of research are identified.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 28-57, March 2024.
A challenge with universal school-based mental health supports is the limited understanding of potential unintended or unanticipated outcomes. In this review, we examined 47 academic and gray literature sources to address the question, “What are the side effects of universal school-based mental health supports?” We discuss how universal supports can positively impact student mental health, enhance school staff’s knowledge and attitudes in addressing mental health topics, and contribute to an improved school climate. However, universal supports can also lead to school staff feeling the strain of resource and time pressures from integrating mental health programming into demanding schedules, voicing frustrations about or exhibiting resistance to mental health supports, and encountering varied, unpredictable outcomes for different student populations across system contexts.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 58-88, March 2024.
In this systematic review, we examine research from 2009 to 2022 to identify and classify the unintended effects of turnaround in the United States. We develop a conceptual framework classifying three types of side effects—spillover effects, systemic side effects, and internal side effects—and differentiate these side effects from unintended negative intervention effects. We identify four broad categories of side effects within this framework based on the population they impact: communities, school systems, educators, and students. We find that the most prevalent side effects are related to educator experiences, staffing, community reaction, education governance, and the proliferation of external actors. We conclude by calling for future research to explicitly examine common side effects alongside the intended effects of turnaround.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 89-120, March 2024.
Role model interventions are often designed to foster students’ pursuit of careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We hypothesize that role model interventions might also unintentionally shape students’ beliefs concerning the broader social system—their ideologies—leading them to view the (inequitable) status quo in STEM as natural and acceptable. A systematic narrative review (35 articles, 42 studies) indicated that the ideological effects of role model interventions were rarely considered in the literature. Although limited, the few relevant findings revealed both desirable and undesirable side effects of role model interventions on students’ ideologies. This review demonstrates that role models can be a double-edged sword and serves as a call to evaluate role model interventions on criteria beyond motivation.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 121-153, March 2024.
Over the past 20 years, there has been a concentrated effort on expanding K–12 pathways, experiences, and access in computer science education (CSEd). Computer science (CS) is a multifaceted discipline within education, and the current emphasis in education policy has focused on how to expand access for K–12 students in CSEd that will lead to increased innovation and bring new participants into the United States labor economy. Industry partners have advocated for policies and incentives to increase pathways to CS opportunities. This chapter interrogates the side effects of CSEd and offers a framework for considering how side effects impact CS teaching and learning. We highlight the barriers that exist within CS and CSEd and how broadening participation in computing efforts could address longstanding equity and disparity issues.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 154-190, March 2024.
Research has demonstrated positive impacts of behavioral interventions on various educational outcomes for autistic youth, and implementation of these interventions in education settings has been widely advocated. However, recent studies have identified methodological shortcomings in the behavioral intervention evidence base, including lack of reporting on side effects and social validity. This review including 98 studies identified as evidence-based practices by the National Clearinghouse on Autism Evidence and Practice further highlights the lack of evaluation of side effects and social validity in behavioral intervention research. Suggestions are given regarding assessment of side effects, embedding social validity into intervention, and practical takeaways for educators. Future research and practice should prioritize addressing potential side effects and advancing ethical implementation of evidence-based behavioral interventions.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 191-219, March 2024.
Quantitative education research is often perceived to be “objective” or “neutral.” However, quantitative research has been and continues to be used to perpetuate inequities; these inequities arise as both intended effects and unintended side effects of traditional quantitative research. In this review of the literature, we synthesize how quantitative researchers have attempted to use critical paradigms to address questions of equity in education research published over the past 15 years. We identify and describe three main tensions that critical and quantitative researchers navigated: (a) creating and analyzing social group categories, (b) trying to describe commonalities within group experiences without erasing heterogeneity of experience within the group, and (c) determining what is a “significant” result when conducting critical and quantitative research.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 220-247, March 2024.
The influence of posthumanist philosophies—broadly defined to include theories such as Baradian new materialism, Deleuzian assemblage theory, Wynterian counterhumanism, Afro-futurism studies, Indigenous studies theories of nonhuman agency, and others—on education research has been increasing at an exponential rate. This chapter provides a review of this literature organized around the theme of ethical and political responsibility. It compares four genres of posthumanist inquiry: assemblage studies, cartographic studies, diffractive studies, and place-based research. It locates these genres on a continuum from descriptive to enactive forms of inquiry. The review concludes with an examination of three different conceptions of futurity that inform posthumanist reconceptualizations of research responsibility, suggesting research is most powerful when all three are attended to in research designs.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 248-286, March 2024.
Performance-based accountability (PBA) has gained popularity worldwide due to its promise to strengthen the effectiveness and equity of educational systems. Nonetheless, its implementation does not always generate the expected reactions within schools. Through a configurative review, we systematically reviewed 133 empirical studies focusing on PBA side effects. We provide novel insights into the literature on PBA side effects, generating a better understanding of how and under what circumstances they are more likely to occur and through which mechanisms. In contrast to existing reviews, our research includes country contexts where accountability designs are predominantly low-stakes and challenges dichotomous ways of thinking about PBA systems. It uncovers side effects across diverse accountability frameworks and investigates differences and similarities in the mechanisms driving them.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page ix-xviii, March 2023.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 1-45, March 2023.
We integrate work from human development, psychology, education, and neuroscience to argue for five interrelated developmental principles that together provide the conceptual basis for a fundamental shift in thinking in education about the nature of learning, and hence the work of teaching, and the purpose and design of schools and youth-facing policies. These principles foreground humans’ natural agency, subjectivity, and variability and the dynamic, adaptive interdependence of body, mind, and culture in development and learning. We take the analogy of weaving cloth to highlight the properties and valuable variations of effective educational systems. We argue that reconceptualizing learning is necessary to meaningfully improve schooling and its outcomes, support equity and human dignity, and ultimately, build a sustainable democratic society.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 46-48, March 2023.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 49-59, March 2023.
Relationships between individual development and historical change are understudied, and yet an understanding of these relationships is foundational to understanding human development. The chapter provides a case study model for investigating individual-historical relations that coordinates archival, ethnographic, interview, and experimental methods. The methodological approach is illustrated in studies on numerical cognition conducted in Papua New Guinea. Two generalizable methodological assumptions are articulated: that the emergence of novel representations and ideas is rooted in individuals’ activities in collective practices and that the dynamic sociogenetic processes in collective practices provide the context for individual development. The chapter concludes by pointing to extensions of the framework to additional studies conducted in a wide range of communities.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 60-83, March 2023.
This chapter suggests that individual and cultural/contextual contributions to learning and development can be understood as mutually constituting aspects of a holistic fractal process flowing across generations. To examine specific aspects of the dynamic mutually constituting process, the chapter suggests foregrounding or focusing on one aspect of the process and keeping others in the background for particular analyses. The chapter treats learning/development as a dynamic process in which individuals and generations transform their participation in ongoing endeavors and in so doing, create and innovate context and culture. The mutually constituting approach changes research questions and reorients methods for understanding human learning and development.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 84-99, March 2023.
This chapter focuses on the utopian methodological approach taken up by social design-based experiments, their conceptual underpinnings, and commitments. The methods are drawn from Gutiérrez’s empirical work and detail ways of seeing and capturing human learning activity crucial to envisioning and enacting new social futures with radical possibilities for those from historically nondominant communities. It elaborates methodological commitments to seeking complexity in human learning activity as it centers equity understood as worldmaking. A review of a range of methodological tools employed across Gutierrez’s studies is presented—from an analytical focus on ensembles and the multiplicity of social spaces in learning ecologies to attending to how people’s repertoires of practices are constituted through participation in everyday activity, as they move in and across the ecologies of everyday life.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 100-115, March 2023.
Children develop and learn within dynamic contexts, yet the simplifying assumptions of common statistical methods often relegate such complexity to unexplained error. This chapter discusses ideas from the dynamic systems literature, which focuses on the interplay within and between components of complex systems, such as individuals and their multitiered contexts. This chapter presents three scenarios highlighting knowledge from the dynamic systems literature. These scenarios have implications requiring reconsidering common approaches to explaining the variance associated with change, the conceptualization of effect sizes, and the use of between-person data and analyses to make within-person inferences. The final section provides resources for moving beyond dynamic metaphors and principles, so theories can be translated into testable hypotheses.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 116-154, March 2023.
In this collection of commentaries, the authors respond to the suite of chapters in this special issue and ask and answer: “Where do we need to go?” Thinking through the “mother value” of dignity, the authors explore the possibilities for education research under the unifying purpose of cultivating “dignity-affirming educational environments” for all people.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 155-160, March 2023.
Transforming difficulties into opportunities for thriving is at the heart of this volume on the science of learning and development. This chapter brings the perspective of European research and the Global North and South and discusses some of the challenges included in the call to create the conditions for promoting sustainable and equitable futures for all. Among others, globalizing transformative knowledge by recreating, replicating, and scaling up success stories in education research can overcome methodological or epistemological limitations. Examples of cocreation and interdisciplinary work are included to produce socially relevant knowledge and be effective in tackling the real problems affecting children and youth. Dialogic learning and successful educational actions illustrate how educational success and transformation can happen.

Review of Research in Education, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 161-166, March 2023.
Transforming the South African education system after decades of apartheid remains a dream for all. This chapter contributes on how this dream can be achieved. To this end, I raise two arguments. First, transformation will require young people to become adept at handling tensions and dilemmas. Second, I propose that the science of learning and development (SoLD) has a possibility to develop such competences. I begin with a look at the colonial education curricula in South Africa until the dawn of a democratic dispensation in 1994. This is followed by a critique of the post-1994 curriculum. In closing, I propose the SoLD model as an alternative to the classroom in South Africa as a route to equity and justice.