Quantitative research is used throughout Physical Review Physics Education Research (PER) to study student and faculty achievement, demographics, and even behavior both online and in the classroom. These data are powerful as they go on to guide policy and practice in both localized and national settings. As a result of this power, many tools and analysis techniques have become standard ways to measure student learning and outcomes, faculty teaching behaviors, departmental changes, and more. As PER matures and research progresses, new tools and analysis techniques are becoming available. Introducing these new tools and techniques means researchers must make decisions about which are appropriate for particular studies. Differences among these tools, even ones that have the same general measurement goal, are not always clear to PER researchers or the broader PER community.

The goal of this Focused Collection is to provide a set of research articles that critically examine current tools and analysis techniques used in PER for quantitative data as well as those that offer new and interesting methods that might not be currently used in PER. We invite manuscripts that examine and challenge standard quantitative research methods in PER as well as those that use novel analysis techniques to provide new insights into data. Rather than simply present what is available, this collection will delve into differences among current tools and techniques to support researchers in making informed choices for their quantitative work.