This essay reviews progress in empirical economics since Leamer'rs (1983) critique. Leamer highlighted the benefits of sensitivity analysis, a procedure in which researchers show how their results change with changes in specification or functional form. Sensitivity analysis has had a salutary but not a revolutionary effect on econometric practice.…

Stories about qualitative educational research situations point out moral dilemmas related to the meaning and shape of researcher obligation: questions that go beyond research codes of ethics. A postmodern-hermeneutic reading of the stories suggests three themes: the intersubjective and lived aspect of qualitative research, the irreducibility of…

Why do people enter academic life? What are their expectations? How can they maximize their experience and achievements, both short- and long-term? How much should they move towards commercialization? What can they do to improve their career? How much autonomy can they reasonably expect? What are the key issues for academics and aspiring academics…

All social science serves some agenda: social science research is a value-bound, value-determined, context-situated, and ideologically loaded enterprise. Each researcher makes choices in the following areas, whether tacitly, implicitly, or deliberately: (1) a paradigm choice, either conventional (rationalistic) or emerging (naturalistic); (2) the…

Characterizes the teacher as an interpreter, a critic, a producer and reproducer of education and ideology at the crossroads of social interaction. Emphasizes the fact that scholars cannot understand the specialization of the teacher's knowledge and work without referring to the teacher as an intellectual, and without revealing the vicissitudes of…

The dimensions of educational evaluation include conceptualization and technology of evaluation. The methods have been drawn from the area of educational and psychological research. The techniques of evaluation need to serve the information needs of clients, address the central value issues, deal with situational realities, meet requirements of…

Reviews the literature concerning teachers as researchers, noting questions about whether teachers are capable of conducting research in their own classrooms, and demanding a definition of "research." (ARH)

For various well-documented reasons, the feminist social movement has been critical of academia as a worksetting and of the social sciences as a set of disciplines. For these reasons, feminists claim that the assumptions underlying several research designs and procedures are sexist. They have developed a feminist methodology to examine these…

Maintains that teachers must make decisions about their own professional growth, as well as about classroom involvement. This professional growth may be facilitated by teachers' active exploration of four dimensions of professional competence--curriculum expert, colleague, mentor, and scholar-researcher. (BB)

This paper deals with use of field research in an investigation of diffusion and use of information in environment of working poor. Highlights include discussion of field research and identification of conceptual themes (gaining entry, field researcher's role, anxiety in field research, rapport, reciprocity, empathy, maturity). Forty references…

Examines American Indian communities' attitudes toward social science research and Anglo social science researchers. Discusses the positive role that Indian social scientists can play in improving the quantity and quality of research conducted in Indian communities. (Author/GC)

The history of institutional research is examined with specific reference to its promotion and organization during the last twenty-five years. It is suggested that institutional research now has all the elements necessary for its continuation and has become an established part of higher education. (Author/SF)

Discusses ethical concerns of information science professionals from two viewpoints: concerns of practitioners and the information industry, including a prototype for ethical contexts and principles for ethical actions; and concerns of theoreticians and researchers, including system principles and ideological, political, and social frameworks.…

Leta Stetter Hollingworth is introduced as the first researcher to study giftedness in girls and women and as a woman who overcame deep-set prejudices against gifts and talents in women, who discredited claims of the natural inferiority of women, and who devised clever experiments to test her hypotheses. (JDD)

Argues that researchers can achieve objectives of advancing basic knowledge and addressing applied problems within a single research program. Provides a framework for this perspective by examining historical trends of basic and applied developmental research and examining potential approaches. Uses research on affordances and childhood injuries to…