Although most teacher education programs include instruction in the basic science of psychology, practicing teachers report that this preparation has low utility. Researchers have considered what sort of information from psychology about children's thinking, emotion, and motivation would be useful for teachers' practice. Here, I take a different…

Written in response to criticism of our work by Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, this position paper reaffirms and reinforces our position about the need to broaden and enrich the scope of nature of science (NOS) oriented curricula by exposing students to the voices of practising scientists. While Abd-El-Khalick's motivation for promoting the so-called…

Keith Marcus congratulates Almond et al. on an interesting article bringing together two topics that are important to the field of testing. He states that some aspects of the exposition came across as not yet fully developed, as if the manuscript had been hurried to press. In this commentary, he attempts to expand aspects of the article, which he…

John Holt was a revolutionary educational, published theorist of the 1970s and dared to report candidly his observations of public school classrooms. He found classrooms far too rigid, impersonal, and teacher-controlled. Children's thinking did not reach higher levels of critical thinking. Curiosity and creativity was stifled and stamped out. He…

The aim of this paper is to discuss the development and evolution of particular personas adopted by researchers in the quest for rich exchanges within the social field. It analyses my role (the principal author) as a female ethnographer (and the sole female) in the world of elite male rowing. Data are drawn from personal notes, reflections and…

This reflective essay describes the author's experiences as an observer in a behaviorist infant classroom. The author developed four categories of practice to describe what happened in the behaviorist infant room: (1) curricular focus on training typically developing infants to meet typical developmental milestones, (2) the use of highly…

Research within a constructivist approach often relies on interview data, which are used to reveal beliefs held by the interviewee or to expose conceptions or conceptual structures that are supposed to reside within the interviewee. From a sociocultural perspective, severe criticism has been leveled against the neglect of the problems of inferring…

Responds to an earlier comment, in a continuing discussion of Parsonian functional imperatives and their basis in observation, their intellectual status, their ability to be tested empirically, and the number of imperatives. (RW)

Clinical scholarship begins with reflective observation of patients but differs from clinical research. It results in knowing based on informed, intelligent, and clinically grounded analysis. It is a more appropriate approach for some kinds of problems. (SK)

This paper contends that behavior observation data relating to speech-language pathology are reliable if they are not affected by differences among observers or other variations in the recording context. The theoretical bases of methods used to estimate reliability for observational data are reviewed, and suggestions are provided for improving the…

Discusses limitations of prescriptive methods of teaching with their preoccupation with rationality and technique. Argues for a more holistic approach to teaching involving observation and imagination. (PKP)

Discusses the importance of considering theory to be rooted in observation and suggests that no observation stops with itself but instead yields another observation. Suggests that what must occur is that teachers become prepared to observe their observations: to look and look again. (MG)

Skills necessary for scientific study that correspond to the cognitive development of the elementary age child, and specifically the gifted student, are discussed. Attention is directed to observation, problem finding and question asking, seeing relationships, note taking, sustaining interest and perseverance, and hypothesizing. (SEW)

In replies to two critiques of his 1980 article, appearing in the fall 1982 issue of "Educational Administration Quarterly," the author first questions the notion that all organizations must meet certain requirements to survive and, second, denies that structured observation research on school administrators is "neo-Taylorism."…

Causes of evaluator bias are: overemphasizing concrete, salient, and retrievable information; reporting only evidence which confirms hypothesis; focusing on stable personality factors, rather than on situation and environment; developing positive perceptions of a program as both an evaluator and a highly involved participant; statistical naivete;…