What to Replicate?

In this second editorial of Implementation and Replication Studies in Mathematics Education (IRME), we address the question of what to look for in research results and findings from mathematics education research in terms of sources for replication studies. Surely, a joke in the mathematics education community goes that mathematics education researchers do not want to replicate, they want to get replicated! Probably this is true for many research fields, not only mathematics education. Still, we deem this not to be the major reason for the relatively small number of replication studies in our field (Aguilar, 2020; Jankvist et al., 2021). Rather we believe this has to do with the research culture. As some of us recently pointed out in the context of studying the use of digital technologies in mathematics education (Jankvist & Misfeldt, 2021), researchers in mathematics education seem more likely to prefer introducing new theoretical constructs for “new problems” rather than looking into the back catalogue of our research field in order to spot already well-developed constructs that may readily provide insights into these new problems (Mason, 2016). This is of course in line with the (mis)interpretation of the old saying “If you want to get ahead, get a theory” (Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder, 1975) to mean that if you want to get ahead, develop a new theory (and have others replicate it). Still, as we know from Schoenfeld (2014), “If you really want to get ahead, get a bunch of theories …, and data to test them” (p. 7). This quote is at the heart of replication in mathematics education, we find. Namely, to gather (different types of) data to “test” the theoretical constructs that we apply and adhere to in our research. Still, this does not answer the questions of what to replicate and why.

Now, another reason for not resorting to constructs from the back catalogue of our research field may of course be that new coming researchers are not necessarily well familiar with the back catalogue. Surely, we have some collections of “classical papers” (e.g. Bishop, 2010), but maybe some “pre-digestion” of our fifty years of research results is needed in order to direct and guide (young) mathematics education researchers in a pursuit of research findings to potentially replicate. We find that the listing by the Editorial Committee of the European Mathematical Society of so-called “solid findings” (in mathematics education research) to some extent illustrates this.