This study assessed the perceptions of faculty employed by the historically black institutions of the University of North Carolina, concerning the personal utility of activities to increase their educational research participation or to gain educational research skills and knowledge. The study was part of a pilot project to develop strategies to…

The dominant view of inquiry reflected in graduate educational research courses has been labelled as positivistic or quantitative. Instructional strategies have been designed to train students to become more skilled in the use of complex statistical procedures, more efficient in the development of preordinate designs permitting increasingly higher…

Graphics research history shows that some topics have been studied heavily while others have been almost entirely neglected. Furthermore, researchers have used many different methods of defining and measuring effects such as legibility and comprehension, and this, together with vagueness in reporting, makes it difficult to compare studies and draw…

A media specialist must refine and adapt his techniques to specialty areas to be effective in a research program. This article presents guidelines for media program development which are applicable to all media forms. Considerations for the media presentation are: purpose of the research, audience, criteria for inclusion, individual needs of…

Research at Tennessee Technological University indicated that library and instructional materials were not being utilized. Additional research showed that graduates of the teacher training program did not use their school library fully or draw upon the media skill of the librarian. The coordinator of the Learning Resource Center (LRC) and a…

Ecological research methodology can assist the educational technologist in both his practical decision making responsibilities and in his more formal pursuit of theoretical understandings. Critics of traditional methodologies maintain that the validity of educational inquiry, as well as the generation and verification of educational theories, can…

A comparison of research and development and teacher competency assessment activities is divided into two tasks: (1) selection and cataloging of competencies; and (2) development of instruments and procedures to assess competencies for diagnostic training and selection. Similarities and differences in selecting and cataloging teacher competencies…

This paper attempts to provide some insight into the reality of data analysis and interpretation. Community college institutional researchers should obtain the skills and techniques required in order to analyze and interpret data; however, there are a number of practical considerations usually not found in textbooks. These include: (1)…

This paper discusses problems and ethical issues in obtaining interview data from young children and presents the "phototalk" method (the use of photographs to facilitate interviews with young children). The method was used in a study of young children's transition to school. Four interviews were conducted with each child, with the first…

This paper discusses a first-year, second-semester composition course that develops thinking, reading, and writing skills both on an individual and on a group level; it is designed to enhance research and writing skills developed in the first-semester course. With this and the departmental course requirements in mind, according to the paper, the…

Undergraduate students are routinely assigned a long research paper--surely the most complex intellectual skill ever expected from them--and expected to write it with a minimum of teacher and library interference and with thorough faith in the end product. More than anything else, the traditional approach to directing research papers focused on…

For some instructors, the use of students' own experiences has proven to be an extremely useful starting point in the college composition classroom. In a first semester freshman composition course, students wrote autobiographies in which they examined different perspectives of the many communities in which they lived. Students then used the…

Library research skills are included in a required graduate level research methods course offered at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). The course--Biological Documentation Techniques--is broadly involved with biological literature retrieval, bibliographic techniques, and data storage. It is taught cooperatively by the Department of Biological…

Field research gives graduate students a direct experience in appreciating the differences between doing research and reporting it. This paper reports the field experience provided in a doctoral program at the School of Education at Syracuse University. With the support and assistance of faculty consultants, a structured problem approach was used.…

A collective assessment of the comparative study of foreign policy as a field of scholarly inquiry is presented. An effort is made to interpret the field's boundaries, to review its accomplishments, and to propose some future directions. The first section, in which the field's scope and boundaries are discussed, asserts that the boundaries are…