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Weekly Digest #115: Open Access Education Journals

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We firmly believe that it would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to be an expert in everything. This is one of the reasons bidirectional communication is so important! Learning researchers and teachers have spent their careers becoming experts in their area, and there is so much that each can learn from the other. It would be unreasonable to expect teachers to become experts in research while also being expert teachers every day. However, we also know that many teachers like to dig into some of the original research articles. So, this week we put together 5 open-access journals that cover education. These journals are all peer-review, but free for anyone to download and read.

(Note: of course there are many more open-access journals beyond this list that are great, and many out there that are not. This is just a list of peer-reviewed, open-access journals, in no particular order. Please do be careful when looking at open access journals to make sure they are legit, as some of them pop up as money making schemes!)

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1) International Journal of STEM Education

This journal covers research related to teaching and learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields.

2) Cognitive Research: Principles in Education

This journal isn't only about education, but really anything where cognitive science can be applied. However, education seems to be a big part of this. Yana, Megan, and another colleague Chris Madan had a paper published in CR:PI earlier this year.

3) Frontiers in Education

This one is well-known as far as open-access goes. They publish in many disciplines, and you can filter articles by topic. The above link brings you to the Education branch, inside which there are 8 sections to choose from to find articles!

4) Frontiers in Psychology

Frontiers is so big that it is worth another link to a different discipline under the big umbrella. There are 28 sections within Frontiers in Psychology, including cognition, cognitive science, and educational psychology!

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5) AERA Open

This is the open-access journal from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). A great journal with a lot of empirical work on education and learning in a lot of different contexts.


Every Sunday, we pick a theme and provide a curated list of links. If you have a theme suggestion, please don’t hesitate to contact us! Occasionally we publish a guest digest, and If you'd like to propose a guest digest click here. Our 5 most recent digests can be found here:

Weekly Digest #110: Creativity in Unlikely Places

Weekly Digest #111: Nutrition and the Brain

Weekly Digest #112: Critical Thinking

Weekly Digest #113: Achieving Work Life Balance in Teachers

Weekly Digest #114: Productivity