How publishing works in this field
The journal landscape splits between research journals, which want theory and method, and practitioner journals, which want something a teacher or administrator can use on Monday. They are not ranked against each other so much as aimed at different readers, and a paper written for one rarely satisfies the other without substantial rewriting.
Context is part of the finding. An intervention that works in one curriculum, one age group and one system may not transfer, and good papers in this field state the conditions explicitly rather than generalising. Reviewers read the limitations section here more carefully than in most disciplines.
What slows papers down here
Consent is more complicated than elsewhere because participants are often minors. Journals expect parental or guardian consent plus child assent, approval from the institution and frequently from the school or district, and a clear account of how withdrawal worked in a classroom setting where opting out is socially costly.
Scale and attrition undercut otherwise sound studies. Small single-school samples, uneven attrition between conditions, and outcome measures chosen after the intervention are the objections that recur, and none can be repaired after data collection.
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Questions we are asked in this field
Typically institutional ethics approval, permission from the school or district, consent from parents or guardians, and assent from the children themselves. Journals ask for all of it, and expect the paper to say how a child could decline without visible cost.
Yes, if it is framed as what it is. Reviewers object to single-site studies presented as general findings, not to the design itself. State the context, the mechanism you think is at work, and what would need to be true elsewhere for it to hold.
Pick one. The two journal types want different structures, different evidence and different lengths. Writing for both usually produces a paper that neither accepts — though the same study can legitimately yield two papers with different framings.