Methodological Trends of 500 Most Cited Educational Research Articles in the Last Decade

The purpose of this research is to reveal which paradigm/research method has dominated the 500 articles that have the highest citation in the last ten years in the field of education and examine whether the dominant paradigms impact the citations. The research was designed as a conversion mixed methods research, which does not highly used in the literature. During the research process, the articles were obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection, Social Science Citation Index-SSCI. To analyze the data obtained, independent researchers coded different articles on an Excel worksheet. Following the intercoder reliability process, two themes and eight sub-themes were identified. As a result of the research, it was found that the most preferred methodological paradigms were respectively quantitative, mixed methods and qualitative. One-way ANOVA test results showed that mixed-method and quantitative articles had higher usage statistics than qualitative articles. Moreover, the most preferred mixed methods design was found to be embedded design.