This digest provides an introduction to content analysis, a systematic, replicable technique for compressing many words of a text into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding. This allows inferences to be made that can then be corroborated using other methods of data collection. In a technical sense, content analysis is not…

This Digest summarizes the results of a survey administered to the American Educational Research Associations Survey Research Special Interest Group regarding the use of electronic surveys and discusses their responses in the context of the existing literature base. Topics include the conditions under which use of e-mail or Web-based surveys would…

This digest examines features of both process and impact evaluations to help officials of youth programs assess the programs for which they are responsible. With proper planning, evaluation can be part of a program without having to compete for attention and resources with the services the program is trying to provide. A process evaluation…

This Digest introduces ethical considerations related to acquiring and analyzing online data and provides resources to support sound practice. Because online conversation is relatively new and unfamiliar, and takes place at a distance, participants may not realize or may not remember that their conversations could be made public. A researcher…

With accurate information, educators are better able to make effective decisions. Besides being used to assess student performance, a complete program of data collection and use can also show educators how management skills, individual learning styles, and other elements affect student achievement. This digest provides an overview of how…

This digest reviews the basic building blocks of a structured interview, points out some of the pitfalls in interviewing, and suggests ways for researchers to avoid these difficulties to produce questions that have the best possibility of generating reliable and accurate data on the topics of interest. The data collection instrument is a document…

The link between child abuse and handicapping conditions is examined in a brief summary of research studies focusing on mentally retarded, behavior disordered, and physically handicapped children. Although standardized data collection procedures are lacking, isolated studies suggest a disproportionate incidence of child abuse among the population…

With accurate information, educators are better able to make effective decisions. Besides being used to assess student performance, a complete program of data collection and use can also show educators how management skills, individual learning styles, and other elements affect student achievement. This digest in Spanish provides an overview of…

Student ratings of instruction are widely used as a basis for personnel decisions and faculty development recommendations. This digest discusses concerns about the validity of student ratings and presents a case for their use in teacher evaluation. There are several strong arguments for using student ratings to evaluate teachers. Students are in a…

Two landmark efforts to describe the condition of American Indian and Alaska Native education nationwide and to call for specific solutions took place in the early 1990s. These efforts were the Indian Nations At Risk Task Force and the White House Conference on Indian Education. This digest summarizes Task Force and Conference recommendations…

Meta-analysis is a collection of systematic techniques for resolving apparent contradictions in research findings. Meta-analysts translate results from different studies to a common metric and statistically explore the relations between study characteristics and findings. Since G. Glass first used the term "meta-analysis" in 1976, it has…

This digest describes the organization of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and what is included in a typical NAEP assessment. The way in which the NAEP selects students for assessments and how the assessments are used are discussed. The NAEP is a congressionally mandated project of the National Center for Education…

Thoughtful, well-planned and systematic reviews of both instructional and noninstructional programs provide community colleges with a way of determining whether programs are meeting stated objectives and what standards of performance should be maintained. Programs that need improvement or should be eliminated can be identified, and fiscal…

Schools are realizing that carefully collected and analyzed data represent the key to educational improvement. This digest outlines the most useful types of data to drive the school-improvement process, steps that must be taken to collect and analyze data, the role of administrators in guiding the data-driven reform process, and results that can…

This brief paper defines participatory action research, reviews the literature on its use, and offers examples of how researchers and practitioners are applying principles of participatory action research data to select effective practices and support change and innovation in schools. Generation of data-based strategies in natural environments is…