Propelling High-quality Development of Education: The Promotive Role of Educational Research

Education, by common consent, is a sophisticated endeavor. As human society advances, people impose increasingly high standards for the quality of education. Educational research has been instrumental in driving educational development and optimizing the function of education. In its broad sense, educational research spans investigations, observations, experiments, systematic discourse and comparative analyses of all phenomena, issues, technologies, strategies, and paradigms arising in the field of education as well as cross-disciplinary studies that relate to education. In its narrow sense, educational research is mainly concerned with education and teaching activities at all levels of schooling (Wang, 1999).