This paper describes a project at Arizona State University West to generate a collection of narratives to be used in professional teacher education and to examine ways narratives and narrative research techniques could be used with students. The first half of the paper lists members of the research team, their individual concerns, how they came…

Social studies research has told us very little in the past 30 years. There are several reasons for this state of affairs in social studies. First, inferential statistics has become much too prominent in research thinking and practice. Replication should be used by researchers to build a useful body of knowledge. A second reason for lack of…

Student tracking systems are enabling increasing numbers of community colleges to respond to external demands for accountability with tangible measurements of student progress and institutional outcomes. Several recent trends in marketing, accountability, communications with students, and internal competition for resources have prompted interest…

Obtaining accurate, comprehensive data for vocational education has been one of the more elusive objectives of federal policy. Given the long history of unsuccessful attempts to improve the quality and scope of data on vocational education, it is important to understand the lessons of the past before embarking on a new data collection effort…

Three topics are discussed: (1) the meaning of feminist research; (2) what can be learned about research practices from feminist efforts to create empowering research designs; and (3) how postmodernism presents challenges to feminist empirical work. Feminist research puts the social construction of gender at the center of one's inquiry in order to…

The politics of program evaluation are discussed from the personal perspective of the Director of the General Accounting Office's Program Evaluation and Methodology Division, which has produced reports for committees of the United States Congress. It is concluded that successful evaluations must be useful to others and must understand the…

Research on sex differences in communication has produced mixed and contradictory results. An erroneous overlap exists between self reports of male-female behaviors, others' reports of perceived behaviors, and stereotyped projections based on social conditioning. The solution to this confusion in gender communication research may be triangulation,…

An aim of many students of human development is to penetrate behavioral variability in such a way as to reveal stable phenomena. This broad aim is challenged on numerous fronts when researchers study infant behavior, for students of infants are everywhere confronted with variability. But, in the context of research, variability of subjects'…

The culmination of many years of implementing and analyzing the Bank Street model in Project Follow Through, this paper provides an extensive discussion of controversial and problematic issues related to the program and reviews what has been learned at Bank Street as a result of experience with Follow Through. Recommendations for program…

A review of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which originated 20 years ago, is presented; and the original political, ideological and social science assumptions for the design of NAEP are examined. The report criticizes the founding principle as hampering NAEP's maximum utility and exploratory power. In examining the form of…

Prepared to advise the Social Science Research Council, this report suggests funding priorities for a program of research in the field of educational applications of information technology, with special reference to the primary and secondary sectors. A discussion of the research program initiative context includes the contributions of governmental…

Offering a synthesis of research and thought on the notion of newsreading as a form of play, this paper focuses on newsreading as a symbolic action of incorporating cultural attitudes by reading a newspaper. Sections of the paper discuss the following topics: (1) play, culture, and communication--defining play in its cultural and communicative…

Examines the methodological procedures of expert systems being used in reading research. Identifies four methodological techniques: (1) intact group comparisons, think-aloud protocols, retrospective analysis, and naturalistic inquiry. Notes internal validity threats for each type, and recommends longitudinal descriptive studies on poor readers to…

Sums up the current status of rural education research, offers explanations for the present situation, and argues for two essential steps in developing a rural research and development agenda: adoption of overarching research paradigms to guide future inquiry and consensus concerning the substantive issues to be studied. (JHZ)

Outlines the foundations of the qualitative and quantitative approaches to research and discusses the implications of these two completely different approaches in educational research. Points out they are not complementary as they are separate scientific paradigms.(MD)