AERA Annual Meeting

The theme of the 2017 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting is a call to examine critical dimensions of educational opportunity and rigor in research as they pertain to the diversity of issues, populations, and contexts served in and by educational inquiry. These range from young children to their parents and families, from PreK-12 to postsecondary education and adult learning, from affluent districts to financially struggling schools, and from immigrant to low-income communities within urban and rural settings alike. They are studied in large datasets and in field studies, and through multiple methods, including qualitative approaches, experimental designs and discourse analyses. They are investigated in both vastly different and complementary theories of learning, human development, literacy, sociolinguistics and culture and within different contexts. They are connected to race, language and gender, and are embedded in systemic inequalities. Finally, they exist alongside enormous technological innovation, new approaches to studying diverse and historically underserved populations, refinement of existing methodologies, recurrent policy revisions and the wide reach of global exchanges.