Quality in research and the significance of community assessment and peer review: education’s idiosyncrasy

Calls for the quality of educational research to be monitored more carefully are examined in the context of the most widely used and trusted form of quality screening, namely, that afforded by peer review. The serious limitations of peer review for this purpose, especially in education, are outlined before discussing the place of peer review publication in the construction of a vigorously critical community of researchers and scholars. It is concluded that quality is both constructed and checked by this community and that there are indications that the scholarly community in education may be less instinctively critical than that in other academic domains. Recommendations for the improvement of quality in educational research centre on placing less emphasis on criteria for the assessment of individual pieces of research and more on the forms of discourse operating in the peer review publication community.