As teacher educators, we want our research to be influential in contributing to educational policy and practice, but there remains little understanding about ways in which teacher educators might more productively engage with each other and policy-makers so as to maximise their research impact. Drawing on an empirical study and policy document…

A chasm is growing between our rapidly rising aspirations for our educational systems and what schools can routinely accomplish. Education needs an improvement paradigm--one that recognizes the complexity of the work of education and the wide variability in outcomes that our systems currently produce. This article sketches out such a paradigm. It…

The evidence-based practice (EBP) movement has the potential to significantly advance the quality of psychological and educational services provided by psychologists working in schools. Training psychologists in EBP has challenged the profession and caused faculty in graduate programs to reevaluate and retool professional training curricula and…

Action research involves researchers and practitioners in collaborative projects and provides a means of integrating evaluation into the reform process. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

The purpose of this study was to examine the literature to find out if the recommendation by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) that mathematics education should focus on problem-solving in the 1980s was being implemented or had caused any changes in the approach to teaching mathematics in the school curriculum. The study also…

This volume represents the output of a yearlong effort to clarify and firm the conceptual base that underlies educational RDD&E. It contains three commissioned papers authored by Drs. Hendrik D. Gideonse, Gene V Glass and Blaine R. Worthen, and by Leslie J. Briggs and one paper prepared by H. Del Schalock and G. Roger Sell of the staff of the…

This study was designed to determine if the regional educational laboratories funded under Title IV of Public Law 89-10 had accepted the charge to become educational change agents. Thirteen critical variables that describe essential change-agent functions were extracted from pertinent literature to provide the framework for a content analysis of…

The purpose of this review is twofold--to summarize the major models of educational change and to present a series of generalizations based on recent empirical studies about educational change. In the first section, previous reviews of the change literature are presented in order to establish a broad perspective concerning research in this area.…

Investigators from seven universities and the National Training Laboratories cooperated in a research project to help 15 school systems improve their effectiveness. Utilizing questionnaire response data from approximately 5,000 adults and 6,000 fifth and 11th grade students, the project analyzed problems of planned change in schools, evaluated the…

The dilemmas faced by the educational research community generally raise important implications for the new National Institute of Education. Pressing social problems require immediate solution, however, demands for immediate results in the complex problem areas of education may lead to incompletely conceived programs and sloppy scholarship.…

This yearbook contains 20 articles pertaining to geometry instruction. Part 1 considers "Perspectives," with articles on the van Hiele model, resolving dilemmas, implications of using computer graphics, chances of geometry surviving in the secondary curriculum, and role of Euclidean geometry. Part 2 provides "A View of Problem Solving and…

The purpose of this chapter is to present a view of the realities facing those playing linking roles and to give direction to renewed efforts to develop training and support mechanisms for linking agents. The first section of the chapter presents the assumptions underlying the paper. The second consists of four principal subsections. The first…

The Research and Development Utilization Program (RDU) was intended to apply research and development products to local school problems; to develop a problem-solving and product selection process usable by local schools; and to organize a linkage system making national, state, and other external resources available to local school personnel. The…

The Action Research on Change in Schools (ARCS) project was a collaborative action research study that involved two levels of research: a specific research project in each of two junior high schools in Michigan and New Hampshire, and a simultaneous study of the collaborative action research process itself as it relates to teachers' individual…

These proceedings present 10 presentations and 3 working group reports from a workshop on the challenges of the new learning culture and their consequences for the partner countries of the European Union (EU). "Introduction and Summary of the Workshop" (Bernhard Buck) begins with a brief overview of distinctions between the vocational…