April 2016
P. Karen Murphy, Pennsylvania State University, has been appointed editor of Review of Educational Research (RER) for the 2017–2019 volume years. She will begin to receive manuscripts on July 1 and will become editor of record in January 2017. She succeeds Frank Worrell, University of California, Berkeley, who will complete his four-year term of service in 2016.
Murphy was appointed in March by 2016 AERA President Jeannie Oakes, concluding a process that began last July with a call for nominations, followed by candidate applications and Journal Publications Committee deliberations. As editor, Murphy will be responsible for leading RER and continuing the excellent track record of this highly regarded peer-reviewed journal. For the third year in a row, in fact, RER has had the top impact factor in the education and education research category of the Journal Citation Reports.
RER publishes critical, integrative reviews of research literature bearing on education. Such reviews include conceptualizations, interpretations, and syntheses of literature and scholarly work in a field broadly relevant to education and educational research. RER encourages the submission of research relevant to education from any discipline, such as reviews of research in psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, political science, economics, computer science, statistics, anthropology, and biology, provided that the review bears on educational issues. RER does not publish original empirical research unless it is incorporated in a broader integrative review. RER will occasionally publish solicited, but carefully refereed, analytic reviews of special topics, particularly from disciplines infrequently represented.
Murphy is a Professor and Harry and Marion Royer Eberly Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University where she holds appointments in the Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling, and Special Education and the Children, Youth, and Families Consortium. Her research focuses on the role of students’ knowledge and beliefs in the comprehension of oral and written language.
Specifically, Murphy’s research involves the investigation of processes underlying students’ abilities to read and understand a text, to critically examine and evaluate the information presented, and to make reasoned judgments as a result of reading. Her ongoing projects, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Science Foundation, explore the use and refinement of Quality Talk, a teacher-facilitated discussion approach, in promoting students’ high-level comprehension, critical-analytic thinking, and content-area learning in elementary language arts and high school science with a particular focus on students enrolled in high-needs schools.
Murphy will be joined by two associate editors: Alicia C. Dowd and Stephanie L. Knight, both at Penn State.
Dowd is Professor of Education and senior scientist in the Center for the Study of Higher Education in the College of Education. Her research focuses on political–economic issues of racial/ethnic equity in college student experiences and outcomes, organizational change, accountability, and the factors affecting student attainment in higher education.
Knight is a Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling, and Special Education and Associate Dean for Undergraduate and Graduate Studies in the College of Education. Dr. Knight’s areas of research expertise include the relationships between instructional strategies, classroom processes, learning environments and student outcomes, particularly in U.S. urban and international settings; preservice and inservice teacher professional development; and the use of observational techniques to study classroom processes.