<scp>BJET</scp> Editorial Spring 2025: Reporting on <scp>AIED</scp> research and ethical considerations

Abstract

We are pleased to share our updates for 2025. The continuing growth and success of BJET, together with changes in our editorial team, have meant that our activities in the last few months have focused on dealing with increasing submissions and bringing new colleagues up to speed. We also took this opportunity to wait until these changes were fully implemented before writing this editorial. Firstly, we must offer our enormous thanks to Professor Sara Hennessy, who stepped down from her role as one of the editors of BJET at the end of 2024. Sara joined the editorial team back in 2016, having previously been a member of BERA's Publications Committee which oversees all four BERA journals. Sara joined BJET at a time when it was facing challenging circumstances, and it is a testament to her hard work, dedication, professionalism along with immense collegiality that the journal has become recognised as one of the top journals in the field of educational research. Sara was quite rightly recognised and thanked at BERA's AGM in November, which celebrated BERA's 50th anniversary. We have all learned so much from her insights and contributions, for which we are very grateful. We wish Sara all the best now that she has a little more time to pursue her own research interests. We are delighted to welcome two new colleagues to our editorial team. Firstly, Dr. Laura Outhwaite, Principal Research Fellow at University College London. Laura has been deeply involved with BJET for many years, having guest edited a special section in 2023 on educational apps and learning, and previously been a member of our triage editorial team. Her expertise includes educational technology for early childhood and the role of policy. Secondly, we welcome Dr. Elisa Rubegni, Senior Lecturer in Computing and Communications at Lancaster University. Elisa has particular expertise in digital making and human-computer interaction, drawing on cultural psychology. These two new colleagues offer complementary expertise to the existing team as well as substantial prior experience of editing. We look forward to the new insights and contributions that they will undoubtedly provide. We also sincerely thank two outgoing triage editors, Prof. Esteban Vázquez-Cano and Prof. Kaushal Kumar Bhagat, who have made significant contributions to BJET's quality assurance process over a number of years. The triage editing role is integral to the journal's continued success. Our triage colleagues consider all submissions that have met our criteria, including alignment with BJET's aims and scope, word length, originality compared to existing published articles, and make recommendations about their suitability for peer review. The BJET editors are grateful for the incredible support and carefully considered insights the triage editors offer. After a rigorous recruitment process, we decided to expand our triage team to ensure that BJET continues to respond promptly to authors while maintaining the highest levels of quality. We are very pleased to welcome to our triage team Prof. Feng-Kuang Chiang, Dr. Dennis Foung, Assoc Prof. Na Li, Dr. Weipeng Yang, and Dr. Jonatan Castaño Muñoz, who join our experienced triage editors, Prof. Jimmy Jaldemark and Dr. Breanne Litts. In 2024, we saw a huge uptick in submissions, with a 39% increase over the previous year, following a 25% increase in 2023. As we write this editorial at the end of February 2025, this trend looks set to continue increasing. Notably, our acceptance rate for 2024 dropped to 11%, reflecting our comments in last year's editorial that the quality of submissions is not necessarily improving despite the increase in volume. We repeat our plea from our 2024 editorial for authors to strive to ensure that their work provides strong evidence of theoretical framing and rigorous analysis, includes deep critical reflection, particularly when discussing the findings, provides an original and significant contribution to the field, includes clear aims and research questions, and is strongly aligned to our aims and scope. Our continued commitment to ensuring that BJET publications are of the highest quality means that we maintain our standing in the field of educational research, as indicated in the 2024 Clarivate Journal Citation Reports. Our Special Sections also continue to provide collections of articles and commentaries on important and topical debates in our field. As noted in last year's editorial, we now invite proposals in both the Spring and Autumn. Calls for Special Sections are advertised on our website and via our social media channels. We would like to remind potential contributors that we regret that we are unable to consider any proposals outside of these biannual calls. Please see our journal website for further details about the Special Sections that have been published to date and those currently under development. We would like to extend our gratitude to all Special Section guest editors who bring a wide range of important issues in our field to our attention and that of our readership. We continue to be inundated with submissions focusing on the applications of AI in learning and teaching. In last year's editorial, we outlined our concerns regarding the lack of theoretical grounding, superficial engagement with existing research in AI in education from fields such as the AIED and LAK communities, and poorly substantiated claims, which have led to an increase in desk rejections (Hennessy et al., 2024). We note that a gap remains in the guidelines for reporting such work. The umbrella use of the term “AI” often hinders replicability and leads to inconsistent reporting of interventions. This inconsistency may lead to broad claims about “AI effectiveness” without adequately distinguishing among the various AI applications, their specific implementations, and the contexts in which they are employed. We, therefore, urge authors to engage in more detailed reporting and evaluation whenever possible. Moving forward, we will particularly be looking for submissions that are nuanced in their terminology and provide detailed specifications of attributes of the systems they are using (e.g. model name, version, provider, any modifications or fine-tuning), any machine learning components (algorithm type, training data), and specify access and licensing conditions as well as deployment and interaction details. Colleagues may draw inspiration from recent papers on how to report the details of the AI and machine learning models used in their research (see, for instance, IBM model cards for guidance on reporting model details). If using models trained and tested on new datasets, please also consider approaches such as the ones used by Deho et al. (2022) and Zhang et al. (2024) on reporting the details of datasets and algorithms. If using commercial Large Language Models, you might also consider providing details on the prompt engineering with an appendix (see, for example, Shen et al., 2025). We welcome feedback around reporting expectations towards greater replicability and meaningful comparisons across studies. In response to the growing recognition of the ethical complexities in educational technology and AI more generally, a collaborative paper with other researchers, including editors of other leading journals (Knight et al., 2024) identified that a significant proportion of papers either omit ethical considerations or merely focus on institutional approvals rather than deeper engagement with ethical issues. As a result, we have started to ask authors to go beyond simply stating ethics approval and to critically reflect on the downstream implications and broader impact of their research. Building on the analysis of editorial policies in Knight et al. (2024), we also identified the need to emphasise learning about ethics rather than merely compliance. We are working with BERA and other scholarly communities and journals to revisit our guidelines for authors and reviewers. As always, we welcome discussion on the Knight et al. paper and any suggestions in relation to our own processes and guidelines. We conclude our editorial for 2025 by repeating our deepest gratitude for the continued support and hard work of our wonderful triage team and statistical advisors, as well as our wider community. Our International Advisory Board, Editorial Board, and Early Career Research Editorial Board members play a key role in advocating for our journal across the world and also undertake a significant number of manuscript reviews. More broadly, we very much appreciate the contributions of everyone who supports our journal, as (potential) authors, reviewers, and readers. Without this team effort over the years to ensure that quality, rigour, and integrity are at the forefront of our endeavours, BJET would not be where it is today.

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