Mainly describing research methodology, this paper outlines an analysis and reporting strategy for the United States national analyses of reading literacy. The first section of the paper is a brief description of the IEA Reading Literacy study and the issues it seeks to answer, along with an outline of three constraints which condition the…

The methodologies employed in comparative higher education and comparative education are briefly summarized and analyzed. Weaknesses of the following approaches used by scholars/researchers in the field are identified: (1) locating decision-making structures and relations in broadly differentiated aggregations of systems; (2) case study; (3)…

In this address, the author examines what it means when one uses phrases like "evidence-based practices" and "evidence-based policies." She suggests that there is a need to re-think the meanings attached to these terms and she presents a rebuttal of the reliance on a single conceptualisation of evidence. The author then argues…

Professional development (PD) for the improvement of educational practice has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. Although experts acknowledge the importance of PD, many PD programmes have little effect on educational practice. This article identifies influences on the effective implementation of Invitational Education (IE) within…

This research originated with the idea that a relationship exists between the culture-specific way of thinking on the one hand and the use of language in special contexts on the other, affecting both meaning and text structure. The goal of the research is to create an interlingual text corpus representing a special type of text that appears in…

This paper reviews the reasons that led to the Congressional mandate in 1976 for a national study of sex discrimination and stereotyping in vocational education and of the progress being made to reduce existing inequities and discusses the goals and methodology of the study, which is presently being conducted. First, in an introduction to the…

Hans-Georg Gadamer's development of the hermeneutic question points to the need for a hermeneutic consciousness in the United States appropriate for human communication research. Communication studies in the United States have taken a route very different from hermeneutics. They are based on attempts to understand the subjective intentions of a…

The author conducted a cross national analysis of sociological research reported in leading journals at two points in time over a ten year period to determine if sociologists' ability to produce valid social generalizations had improved significantly over the recent past. The official journals of the United States (American Sociological Review),…

Student perceptions of their classroom environment correlated consistently with end-of-course cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning outcomes, with or without statistical controls for ability, pretests, or both measures. Twelve classroom observation studies, kindergarten to grade 12, that reported simple, partial, and part correlations…

Presents results of the Library Crime Research Project, a three-year study of crime and disruption patterns in public libraries in all 50 states. Patterns of crime, costs of crime (direct, indirect), losses due to crime, patterns of security use, and effects of victimization are covered. Three references are listed. (EJS)

Studied usefulness of Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) for cross-national comparisons of nursery school quality. Found that ratings can be made in two hours, and can provide comparisons on several important criteria, but because the scale is empirically, rather than theoretically based, its use can obscure cultural differences in…

Provides examples from six studies to illustrate how the formative research element of the Sesame Workshop production model has been used to create effective educational media in the United States, South Africa, Egypt, and China. Shows how lessons learned from formative studies provide insights into the development of new research methodologies…

Conceptual, methodological, and ideological issues in college student attrition in the United States and Canada are discussed; and policy implications of attrition research are examined. It is argued that research in the United States has focused on those who have already demonstrated capacity for success, but greater emphasis on equality of…

A crossed random effects model is presented that applies to data with a nested structure to provide maximum likelihood estimates through the EM algorithm. The procedure is illustrated in studies of neighborhood and school effects on educational attainment in Scotland and classroom effects on mathematics learning in the United States. (SLD)

Although focus groups continue to gain popularity in marketing and social science research, their use in program evaluation has been limited. Here we demonstrate how focus groups can benefit evaluators, program staff, policy makers and administrators by providing an in-depth understanding of program effectiveness from the perspective of…