Through the materiality of fieldwork at a high-achieving high-poverty high school, I discuss how the collision between practices of feminist methodology and the materiality of fieldwork forced me to rethink the "feminist" in feminist research. Using the work of Karen Barad, this material-discursive account of methodology as ontology…

Teachers as well as students often have difficulty formulating good research questions because not all questions lend themselves to scientific investigation. The following is a guide for high-school and college life-science teachers to help students define question types central to biological field studies. The mayfly nymph was selected as the…

The procedures for the selection of a test population to use and evaluate the short units developed by the Sociological Resources for the Social Studies Project (SRSS), "Episodes in Social Inquiry Series," are considered. They wanted to assess the effectiveness of the materials under a variety of circumstances: classes from different…

Practical methods for implementing true experimental designs in evaluation settings in which such designs are rarely used are presented. Particular attention is paid to educational settings. (Author/JKS)

Based on personal experiences in conducting intensive ethnographic fieldwork, the social, emotional, and personal aspects of fieldwork that are often neglected in the literature are considered. The fieldwork involved observations within five diverse secondary schools during a 2-year period in conjunction with a project on microcomputer…

In socio-cultural field studies the professional investigator encounters problems which raise questions about the researcher's role and influence in the field. A study investigating how a lower and lower-middle class suburban socio-cultural society and an art teacher influence high school students' assumptions about art, also examines the…

This paper examines some ethical problems that arose in a study of secondary curriculum, where educational criticism was used as a primary research strategy. A study on the subject of curriculum consonance was conducted in three tenth-grade history classrooms. In its original design, the study was primarily concerned with the correspondence…

This report is drawn from an ethnographic study still in progress of the principalship of a comprehensive public senior high school in a suburban community. Following a discussion of the paucity of research offering good descriptions of what principals actually do as opposed to what they should do, the study methodology is outlined, including…

A formally conducted field study was used to investigate the work of vice-principals of eight large Southern California high schools and the relationship of their work to the school as an organization. Most of the vice-principals studied deal with student discipline, but four have important discipline responsibilities, which they exercise by…

Describes a field study in which the researcher developed a feminist materialist alternative to the subject object dualism in ethnography; critiques the discourse of naturalistic ethnography and presents various political and ethical implications for forms of feminist and critical theory and praxis. (GLR)

THE PURPOSES OF THIS PAPER ARE TO EXAMINE THE RESEARCH METHODS GENERALLY UTILIZED IN DIFFUSION RESEARCH AND TO SUGGEST RESEARCH METHODS WHICH MIGHT HELP PROVIDE A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE DIFFUSION PROCESS. TO PROMOTE THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE COMPLETE DIFFUSION PROCESS OF EDUCATIONAL CHANGE, RESEARCH SHOULD CONSIDER THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS,…

Patterns of problem-solving activity in one middle-class urban high school are examined and a problem solving model rooted in a conceptual framework of contingency theory is presented. Contingency theory stresses that as political, economic, and social conditions in an organization's environment become problematic, the internal structures of the…