Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Dissertation - NSU Access Only

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education and School of Criminal Justice

Advisor

Johanna Tunon

Committee Member

Charles A. Schlosser

Committee Member

Ron Chenail

Keywords

Bibliometrics, Citation Analysis, Cluster Grouping, Educational Technology, Statistical Distributions.

Abstract

A widely held philosophy is that building research on the ideas of others in cycles of researching, reporting and replicating, gradually builds new and supports existing knowledge. Sachs (1984) implemented a quantitative, descriptive study to discover if educational technology practitioners implemented these research cycles. He looked for indications in lists of cited works in published research literature that they built their investigations on the ideas of other educational technologists.

This study replicated Sachs's (1984) research by applying it to published educational technology research articles across the time span of 1990 through 2010. The bibliometrics of the citation and cocitation frequencies of cited authors were counted, arranged in core-and-scatter patterns, and cluster analyzed. The study successfully generated useful, empirical, descriptive information about the research connections embedded in the citation practices of educational technology practitioners. The study contributes data for educational technology practitioners to use in building retrospective studies and also models a way to generate useful emergent educational technology trend information.

The overall implications of the study's results were that the researchers whose works were published in the Educational Technology Research and Development journal did build their investigations on the ideas of other educational technology practitioners. However, the lack of widespread consensus of the field's definition, lexicon, and foundational origins, as well as the boundaries of the scope of its practices, was shown to be a major limitation to the study's findings.

As a result, it is recommended that future research efforts begin by reframing the understanding of the educational technology knowledge domain as interdisciplinary. Then, Palmer's (2001) bibliometrically-derived indicators should be used in a replication of this study. This could more fully describe published educational technology researchers' practices. That is because the resulting descriptions would focus on which educational technology researchers were most actively combining the import and export of wide-ranging, educational technology knowledge-building theories, methods, and/or practices.

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