This document discusses increasing public interest in education and the image problem educational research has with the public. Educational research and development is a new field which is still finding its way. The following recommendations can help meet the general public's expectations and establish a more productive relationship with users:…

William Stephenson's Q methodology has been linked to the future of communications research by some and condemned as treacherous by others. This study reviews the uses of Q in published mass communications research over the past 20 years. The survey found 30 mass communications studies published in English in the scholarly journals related to mass…

A review of the conceptual and methodological considerations in assessment and treatment of children's fears and phobias is presented. Areas discussed include the definitional problems in the field, analogue and clinical research, experimental research methods, and criteria for the evaluation of outcome in fear and phobia research. (Author/DWH)

Mathematical proof is one of the most difficult topics for students to learn. Several empirical studies revealed different kinds of students' problems in this area. Our own research suggests that students' views on proofs and their abilities in proving are significantly influenced by their specific mathematics classrooms. However, the reasons for…

This paper describes the design of a major development and research project within the Teaching and Learning Research Programme in the United Kingdom. It outlines the project's aims to enhance teaching and learning in schools through innovative practice at classroom and school level and through networking. It describes the assumptions and…

One of the goals of the Strategies and Models for Improved Learning through Effective Data Use (SMILE) project was to develop a data-capacity survey (DCS) to measure a schools capacity to use data. In this study, a DCS was developed and field tested. The DCS, which was field tested at six Milwaukee Public Schools (Wisconsin), was a pen-and-paper…

A general model is derived for the purpose of efficiently allocating integral numbers of units in multi-level designs given prespecified power levels. The derivation of the model is based on a constrained optimization problem that maximizes a general form of a ratio of expected mean squares subject to a budget constraint. This model provides more…

Tests of mean equality proposed by Alexander and Govern (1994) and Tsakok (1978) were compared to the well-known procedures of Brown and Forsythe (1974), James (1951), and Welch (1951) for their ability to limit the number of Type I errors in one-way designs where the underlying distributions were nonnormal, variances were nonhomogeneous, and…

With the advent of the computer and user-friendly statistical software packages, factor analysis has become accessible to most researchers. However, conventional factor analysis, or R-technique, is only useful for research concerning types or groups of variables. Educational and psychological researchers are often interested in types of people,…

Social penetration has been described by S.W. Littlejohn (1992) as "the process of increasing disclosure and intimacy in a relationship." The phrase "social penetration" originated with I. Altman and D. Taylor, the foremost researchers in this area. From other theories, Altman and Taylor developed a unified theory which…

This paper discusses self-assessment--i.e., the act of evaluating or monitoring one's own level of knowledge, performance, and understanding--in a metacognitive framework, taking into account the contexts in which self-assessment occurs. It begins with a brief review of metacognitive and social psychology theories that pertain to self-assessment.…

A study examined the mass media research literature to determine if there was a dominant paradigm in the field. The mass media research published in eight communication journals from 1965 to 1989 was content analyzed to identify paradigm, orientation (focus and theory), data (type, source, and sample), methodology (type and manipulation), and…

This paper addresses research issues and strategies with regard to studying the educational treatment of the black college athlete. The paper begins with an explanation of four intitial premises, after which problem areas are identified indicating that: for athletic students, admissions may be based primarily on athletic promise; in the high…

A brief, practical overview of "design effects" (DEFFs) is presented for users of the results of sample surveys. The overview is intended to help such users to determine how and when to use DEFFs and to compute them correctly. DEFFs are needed only for inferential statistics, not for descriptive statistics. When the selections for…

Basic principles underlying statistical power are examined; and issues pertaining to effect size, sample size, error variance, and significance level are highlighted via the use of specific hypothetical examples. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and related methods remain popular, although other procedures sometimes have more statistical power against…