The critical reading of research involves: (1) comprehension, (2) evaluation, and (3) application. A study examined six recently published textbooks to determine to what extent they attempt to help students learn to apply educational research; these texts were specifically designed for "consumers" of research (i.e., critical readers of research) as opposed to those who do research. In general, these texts emphasized the content needed to comprehend research and the evaluation of research as an activity separate from intended use. That is, all texts emphasized the comprehension and evaluation of research as research, with external validity being the main concern that would fall under application. Consistent with the positivist outlook assumed in most of these books, the concerns and functional knowledge of the practitioner was not much in evidence in most of these books beyond the introductions. The results of the study, therefore, were disappointing in that they revealed that there was very little attention paid to research applications in these books. The assumption seems to be that once the reader has comprehended the research and evaluated it, the implications will be evident. Operating within a quantitative framework, none of the books specifically dealt with the problems of moving from a statistically defined tendency within a population to making decisions about a non-random sample of that population. There was little effort to explain validity as a concept that changes both with the nature of the thing being evaluated and the person doing the evaluating. (Contains 20 references.) (TB)