In response to a frequently articulated call for "ecological" validity from instructional communication investigations, this paper reports on methodological issues which evolved during the development and application of a coding scheme for content analyzing teacher compliance-gaining messages. Starting with a consideration of the…

An overview of research regarding mid-level administrators' careers is presented, and research topics and strategies for studying career opportunities are proposed. The review focuses on how mid-level administrators' careers are studied and the purposes of those studies. From research completed between 1969 and 1985, 30 studies about mid-level…

The primary research problem confronting many experimental researchers is finding valid stimulus (instructional) and criterial (testing) materials that operationally fit their hypotheses. Five experimental studies have been completed, and two are in progress, using the Dwyer instructional materials to address the problem of finding valid…

The site variability issue for Direct Instruction Follow Through sites is examined from a variety of perspectives--meta-analysis of the Abt Associates' data, norm-referenced comparisons, and a longitudinal look at stability of effects. Much of the seemingly unexplained variability found in both the Abt report and the reports by M. Kennedy and E.…

Group interviews were found to be a liberating research methodology when used in a study to determine the views of 1,000 secondary school girls in Uganda concerning family life and work. A liberating method of interviewing has the following characteristics: it is nonexploitative, the subjects have some control over the situation, there is two-way…

Neo-marxist theory provides a better tool for educational researchers than other research methodologies because of its focus on empowering the dispossessed and its interest in the relationships between human activity and material circumstances. Traditional educational research is rooted in the positivist tradition and claims to be value neutral…

Previous research on class size has serious limitations because factors such as the abilities of pupils or the experience and teaching style of teachers were not controlled, and because of inconsistent criteria for large and small classes and for criteria of success. A major two-year study was mounted with four class sizes, random assignment of…

The follow-up of participants in a longitudinal survey can be difficult and expensive. This paper reviews the experiences of Project TALENT's 11-year follow-up survey of 400,000 individuals tested as high school students in 1960 and the experiences of follow-ups in other longitudinal studies. Methods for minimizing sample attrition and detecting…

To explore androcentric bias in the "Educational Administration Quarterly" (EAQ), researchers performed a content analysis of 90 articles from ten volumes of the EAQ (1970-1979). An initial demographic analysis of the articles looked at the author's gender, article focus, and use of sexist language. The researchers then examined five…

The presentation reviews the empirical data concerning the existence and types of language problems experienced by learning disabled (LD) and reading disabled (RD) children. An introductory section provides criteria for classification as LD in research samples and a discussion of research data sources in the field of language assessment. Section…

A persistent problem in aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI) research has been the need for a better conceptualization of instructional treatments. The concerns are important in the analysis of instructional treatments: the importance of considering the psychological processes called upon by the instructional treatment, and the ecological validity…

In a conference convened to evolve new research approaches to the study of child development within the family, workgroups discussed emerging issues and priorities in research on children and families, information on children and families (needs and sources), and current methods and approaches in child development research. Workgroup I evaluated…

Case Studies in Science Education used a combined research approach of case study and survey to address the question of the status of science education in the United States. Nine experienced researchers with backgrounds in anthropology, sociology, educational psychology, and science education conducted eleven case studies. These field researchers…

A number of examples are presented to illustrate a common flaw in the published research on learning, memory, and instruction. Experimental subjects--often college students--have certain expectations about the problems they will be asked to solve and about the questions that will appear on reading comprehension or recall tests; these expectations…

Joreskog has developed a very general and powerful model and computer program for analyzing relationships among variables, called LISREL. Structural analysis of covariance matrices by Joreskog's LISREL method is proposed as an alternative to regression methodology in the analysis of aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI) data. LISREL resolves some…