In this commentary, I summarize my own research with colleagues to affirm Dr. Gersten's call for considering design experiments prior to conducting intervention research. I describe how design experiments not only can inform teaching and the learning of innovative approaches, but also hold the promise of effectively bridging the…

In the No Child Left Behind Act and the What Works Clearinghouse, the federal government has attempted to establish guidelines for the type of education research that U.S. schools should consider in selecting instructional programs and resources. The government's clear preference for the medical model--a powerful research design in such fields as…

This paper describes how an ethnographer proceeded in a study of group identify, voice, and participation in the greater culture of gay and bisexual college men at a large research university. The researcher, himself a heterosexual man, conceptualized the investigation as a crossing of cultural borders. The investigator initially attended several…

This discussion of the contested/problematic concept (i.e., words that are open to debate and discussion as to their meaning) focuses on the notion of theory as one example in educational technology. Arguing that the notions of contested and problematic suggest debate, re-interpretation, and the need for dialogue with others to establish meaning,…

If they are to develop more effective social intervention strategies, social scientists must pay attention to social causality in their research. This will lead to more credibility for the social sciences and more support for research funds. Social causality is defined as a social process that produces a change in some dependent variable. It…

An alternative research methodology is presented which focuses on the aims and values of education while attending to the learner as an elaborate, dynamic, everchanging total system. A summary covers the reactive, preactive, proactive, and spiralling learner systems, each of which meet the definitional system requirement of being dynamic, having a…

This investigation examines two contrasting evaluations of early childhood education: the Westinghouse-Ohio University study and the Ypsilanti Perry Preschool Project. The Westinghouse study concluded that Head Start experience had very little, if any, academic value for participating children, whereas the Perry Preschool Project concluded that…

Attempting to determine how best to investigate the developmental consequences of social change, this talk discusses and comments on (1) recent research on the family as a world in which children grow up; in particular, the shift away from focusing upon the mother-child relationship as the influence of overwhelming importance in early childhood to…

The problem of change scores' correlation with initial status and the problem of low reliability in the measurement of change are addressed. By treating the correlation between initial status and change as a design problem rather than a statistical issue, research questions can be formulated in terms of changes in the shapes of growth curves…

Naturalistic inquiry (based on the ethnographic research paradigm) has the potential to supplement, or possibly to replace, quantitative experimental research in education. For years most reading researchers have used the experimental research design. This design fails to tap self-concept, value systems, purpose of and attitude toward reading,…

Educational researchers have claimed that the quantitative and qualitative approaches to educational inquiry are, indeed, compatible. However, it would be unfortunate to discontinue this debate. The quantitative-qualitative debate began with the interpretive approach to social inquiry. Dilthey argued that since cultural/moral sciences differ from…

The purpose of this paper is threefold: to describe grounded theory research strategies, to present a summary of several studies in education that have followed this approach, and to explore the potential uses of the grounded theory techniques in curriculum theory generation. The paper is arranged into six parts. In the first and second parts of…

This paper is based on the premise that relatively little is known about how to improve validity in qualitative research and less is known about how to estimate validity in studies conducted by others. The purpose of the study was to describe the conceptualization of validity in qualitative inquiry to determine how it was used by the author of a…

Qualitative research procedures may be characterized by the practice of empiricism that is sensitive to individual perspectives of reality. The many techniques that may be used are malleable and situation-specific in their design--contingent on those aspects of social phenomena that are chosen to be studied. Practical curriculum design for…

Whereas rigorous quantitative methods (in experimental methods, data interpretation, concept formation, hypothesis construction) and formal style and format are essential in theory verification research, their applicability centers on the fact that in theory verification research, it is necessary to determine whether the strategies used for…