This comprehensive professional handbook will help transition specialists, general and special educators, school psychologists, and administrators support youth and young adults in setting goals and achieving positive outcomes across employment, education, and community settings. Through up-to-date research and in-depth analyses of five successful…

The paper presents strategies for conducting research helpful to community instruction for students with autism. Research issues in setting variables (including heterogeneous/homogeneous groupings and instructional environments) are addressed as well as the use of the discrete trial format (including prompts, responses, and consequences). (CL)

In order to inform policy and programs, research on child abuse must be not only methodologically rigorous, but also practically feasible. However, practical problems make child abuse research difficult to conduct. Definitions of abuse must be explicit and different types of abuse must be assessed separately. Study samples should be as…

In an attempt to improve the communication process and draw attention to some ideas that need further study, a communication model that deals specifically with the supervisor-teacher interaction process is presented. (Author)

The 12 states comprising the North Central Region have been affected in similar ways by the farm crisis of the 1980s. Statewide surveys show sizeable proportions of farm operations that are experiencing moderately high levels of financial stress. The problems caused by chronic stress on family structure and functioning, the loss of mainstreet…

There exists an abundance of research on topics relevant to the decisions organizations must take in allocating and developing their resources. This paper addresses the problem of integrating those research results. Data needed for the meta-analysis approach to research integration are sometimes not available in the published literature.…

Reports on a program held at the 1986 American Library Association Conference which offered a model for locating and evaluating existing research on libraries. Six guidelines for evaluating research are provided, and small group sessions which evaluated actual research and talked directly with researchers are described. (EM)

Major obstacles to conducting process research with parent education programs exist; new directions for studying how programs interact with participants are needed. In particular, intervention research is time consuming and expensive. The small number of subjects involved are often at risk and under considerable social stress. Self-selection and…

Describes what reflective teaching should look like, offering 12 critical attributes that indicate a teacher's stance toward reflection and 4 assumptions upon which the attributes are based. The paper discusses the utility of the attributes in terms of a research agenda and teacher education program decisions they might inform. (SM)

The Surgeon General's report on children with special health needs proposes seven action steps needed to implement a community-based family centered health care approach. Recommended are the following actions: Pledge a national commitment to all children with special health care needs and their families; Encourage building community-based service…

A study was undertaken to develop guidelines for the interpretation of the parameters of three multidimensional item response theory models and to determine the relationship between the parameters and traditional concepts of item difficulty and discrimination. The three models considered were multidimensional extensions of the one-, two-, and…

This article discusses a workshop that explored research barriers in early intervention for children with autism in the United Kingdom. Following a summary of presentations, recommendations are made for the research agenda, basic research design, data collection, data analysis, interpretation of tests, improving statistical power, and a research…

A review of more than 3,000 books, monographs, journal articles, papers and other reports was conducted to discover what kinds of design, measurement, and analytical lessons have been learned as a result of the enormous volume of college-impact-on-student studies that have been published in the last 20 years and to determine how these lessons…

Death education is presently viewed as an ongoing process throughout the life cycle, with the responsibility for it being shared by home, church, other community agencies, and the schools. Goals for a death education program include the following: to inform children of basic facts concerning the multidimensional aspects of death and dying; to…

Attitude and opinion research requires considerable planning, careful design of survey procedures and sampling techniques, and practical ways of collecting, analyzing, and reporting results. The following suggestions are based on the extensive public opinion research conducted by the University of Alabama. (1) Decide what specific problem is to be…