Identifies assumptions about teachers' work and working conditions evident in action research, examining patterns in the parameters of work and workplace issues and analyzing research and various projects from the 1970s and 1980s. Aspects of feminist theory are used to address tensions and contradictions in teachers' practice of action research.…

Clarifies themes common among articles in this volume, including the importance of collaboration between local and outside educators; the changing organization of language, literacy, and math instruction as local knowledge becomes the basis for curriculum; and enabling and disabling conditions for such change to occur (such as bilingual bicultural…

Sport pedagogy research is a young field yielding increasing amounts of information in such areas as improvement of school- and agency-based physical education programs. Adjustments to its knowledge system are suggested for obtaining more useful knowledge from research (e.g., adjustments in approaches to organizing, communicating, and applying…

Profiles a few of the affinities between pragmatists and scientific realists, and indicates a few dramatic differences dividing these schools of thought. Pragmatic research is driven by anticipated consequences. Scientific realists hope to find the truth about what the world is really like. (SLD)

A study used the Educational Resources and Information Center (ERIC) database as a resource for journal articles on adult education and women since 1971 to examine the recent effort at including inquiry on women and gender in the adult education literature. Once the ERIC database was searched and analyzed for possible trends, a random sample of…

The community college movement has been well-documented since the organization of the first junior colleges. This documentation has been maintained by six groups: scholars and professors, the popular media, institutional research, state agencies, faculty organizations, and national organizations. Currently, approximately 100 scholars and…

Although feminist perspectives about research have not been presented in a unified paradigm, feminist theory has helped to expose and demystify the empirical assumption of objectivity as the only way to truth in research. The feminist perspective in research represents alternate, non-oppressive formulations of what constitutes meaningful and valid…

It is argued that the debate between qualitative and quantitative research for educational researchers is actually an argument between constructivism and positivism. Positivism has been the basis for most quantitative research in education. Two different things are actually meant when constructivism is discussed (constructivism and…

This monograph addresses the challenge of improving literacy learning for all children, especially those in language-minority classrooms. The monograph introduces some of these classrooms in detail, examining and describing their literacy practices and setting forth some of the principles of learning and language that underlie them. It is the…

An interview study examined the assumptions about adult learning held by 28 educational policy-makers, researchers, and staff developers. Fifteen assumptions were inferred from the interview data, each forming a dimension that describes learning as experienced by the participants: (1) Adult learning experiences are envisioned as similar for all…

Topics and methodologies used by researchers of teacher development activities are examined in this paper. Selected studies in educational research are analyzed and grouped into four areas. The first research design considered is the traditional empirical-analytic, or hypothesis testing paradigm, through which studies are conducted to test the…

This document was developed to (1) help clarify the various concepts of retention and attrition within a unifying conceptual framework, (2) synthesize the research on retention and attrition, and (3) examine the implications of the research for postsecondary administrators and researchers. Retention and attrition research pertains to both the…

Research on women and employment, and on women generally, has had a tendency to focus on either person or situation variables, overlooking behavior as a function of the interaction of both. The omission of situation variables and the concentration on person variables in research on women and employment has serious consequences in drawing policy…

This examination of misunderstandings between librarians and teaching faculty over concepts of library use and research concludes that library skills and research skills are essentially different things that can be learned in isolation from each other. Implications of these findings for bibliographic instruction and library policies are discussed.…

The authors evaluated single subject research studies in accordance with the following criteria: Was the study applied, behavioral, reliable, analytic, effective, and generalizable? All of the reviews have been checked for accuracy in two ways. First, each author received feedback from the professor. After each feedback session, authors then…