Cites court rulings that the plaintiff must identify the causal relationship between a statistical imbalance and specific employment practices. Indicates that university promotion, tenure, and salary decisions will be upheld if the judgments are based on a merit system with the criteria of teaching, research, and service. (MLF)

Employs a pragmatic philosophical perspective to argue that there is no incompatibility at either the level of practice or that of epistemology between qualitative and quantitative methods of educational research. (FMW)

Provides a philosophical framework for the development of information literacy programs integrated into school curriculums; reports on research in Australia that examines the impact of integrated information literacy programs on secondary school student learning and attitudes; and explores general principles for information literacy instructional…

Provides a conceptual framework for information systems (IS) that can be used in AIDS intervention and prevention (AIP). System components are analyzed, including a database, decision support systems (DSS), expert systems, and software; potential applications of ISAIP are suggested; and an example of a system implemented at Wright State University…

Examines the strengths and weaknesses of interpretive and quantitative research methods in comparative developmental research. Cites three recent studies of the Yupno, Fiji, and Mayan peoples to show how the interpretive approach contributes to the understanding of the meaning of behavior in context whereas the quantitative approach contributes a…

Studies the performance of probabilistic information retrieval systems using differing statistical dependence assumptions when estimating the probabilities inherent in the retrieval model. Experimental results using the Bahadur Lazarsfeld expansion on the Cystic Fibrosis database are discussed that suggest that incorporating term dependence…

The "U.S. News and World Report" rankings of colleges do not affect institutions equally; the schools impacted most are those that have the most to lose because they benefit from, even rely on, the rankings for prestige and visibility. The magazine relies on the rankings for substantial sales revenues, and has garnered considerable power…

This paper analyzes the "University Grammar of English" by Randolph Quirk and Sidney Greenbaum (1973) from the point of view of isolation of forms of language from meaning used to convey these forms, especially regarding gender differences and relations in the main characters, John and Mary Smith. It is suggested that females are underrepresented,…

This paper, a result of a series of meetings of researchers, discusses critical issues related to the conduct of high-quality intervention research in special education using experimental and quasi-experimental designs that compare outcomes for different groups of students. It stresses the need to balance design components that satisfy laboratory…

Uses of quantitative research for studying the relationship between school leadership and educational reform are discussed in this paper. Perceived inadequacies of quantitative methods are that such methods are inadequate for dealing with real-life complex phenomena, and that they require degrees of control that cannot be realistically achieved.…

Statistics tend to become interesting to non-methodologists when taught in a research context that is relevant to them. Real data sets supplemented by sufficient background information can provide just such a context. Despite this, many textbook authors and instructors of applied statistics rely on artificial data sets to illustrate statistical…

Two approaches of statistical testing are critically reviewed. A new approach, which is a hybrid of the two, is proposed. The new approach requires the researcher to think about the two types of potential inferential errors and an explicit alternative hypothesis of interest. (VM)

This paper argues that a typical use of regression models to target student recruitment efforts is theoretically unsound and may therefore be operationally inefficient. It presents results from a study using a predictive model to identify the prospective students on whom recruitment efforts have the greatest impact. The model uses four kinds of…

Discusses the lack of quantitative standards in the ARL-ACRL Standards for University Libraries and demonstrates the use of statistical techniques to analyze data and derive minimal criteria which, while they describe quantitative relationships among libraries, provide no indication of quality of services. Sixteen references are cited. (RAA)

Two problems are addressed in relation to agricultural education research: (1) Is the Type I error rate affected when nonindependent multiple statistical tests are made? And (2) does statistical significance automatically mean that the results are of practical importance? (LRA)