Abstract

No one can doubt the important role that quantitative research methods have played in education research, particularly in our attempts to evaluate education policy in a suitably rigorous manner. Certainly quantitative methods of analysis have an appeal to policy-makers because they produce ‘hard numbers’ to inform the decisions governments need to make, or at least to justify the ones that they want to make.

Anna Vignoles discusses the historical development of quantitative methods in education research and education policy-making and illustrates how the potential of quantitative methods has been significantly enhanced by step changes in the quantity and quality of data available. She argues that further improvements in the quality and usefulness of education research will be achieved by the widespread adoption of mixed method approaches and that this development will be as important as inter-disciplinary working to the future of education research.