More than 25 years ago, Boyer [1] called for an expanded definition of the term scholarship to "... break out of the tired old teaching versus research debate and define, in more creative ways, what it means to be a scholar." It is tempting to reread Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professorate within the context of the growth in recent years of what has become known as discipline-based educational research (DBER). For the sake of argument, we will define DBER in terms of three critical elements: (1) a well-articulated set of guiding research questions, (2) an explicit choice of theoretical framework on which the study can be based, and (3) a choice of methodology that is appropriate for probing these research questions. This paper will discuss these three elements of a good educational research study, look at several theoretical frameworks we have used for our chemical education research, examine a model of five domains of project evaluation, and provide an introduction to Action Research as a framework upon which to build a tightly coupled implementation and evaluation design for curriculum reform projects.