Illustrates some of the methodological problems, in relation to some pitfalls in the qualitative analysis, that are associated with gender, education, and discourse studies. Two studies are critically evaluated as a basis for further discussion: one from the primary education sector and the other from a further education perspective. (GR)

Posits the disciplinary context is the locus of legitimate and illegitimate activity in science and scholarship. Compares structural features of sciences and social sciences that influence malpractice rates, type, and detection. These features include research activity, replication and replicability, coauthorship, plagiarism, locus of creativity…

The relationships among grade, substance assessed, and type of measurement and statistical analysis used in the detection of external validity threats resulting from subject attrition in a modal follow-up study were examined in 6 successive 2-year panels of adolescents, including 4,819 overall stayers and 1,897 dropouts. (SLD)

This paper examined the assessment of second-language proficiency in 157 research articles published in 5 language journals from 1988 through 1992, finding 4 major conventions for the assessment of language proficiency: (1) impressionistic judgment; (2) institutional status; (3) in-house measures; and (4) standardized test scores. (64 references)…

Reviews the "Journal of Curriculum and Supervision" Spring 1990 issue from a scientific viewpoint. This article found ambiguous word meanings, apparent contradictions in and among several authors' writings, an artificially dichotomous formulation of the relationship between two complementary inquiry methods and uncritically held…

International comparisons of academic achievement are faulted by methodological problems. U.S. schools are doing better in international comparisons than we have been led to believe. However, there are shortcomings. An education reform agenda needs to treat poor urban and rural schools as patients in an intensive-care ward. (MLF)

Data of Skodak and Skeels (1949) are reinterpreted to suggest that at least one-third of the reported advantage of adopted children's intelligence quotients (IQ) over adoptive mothers is an artifact of the IQ test norms. The children's mean IQ could easily be higher than the estimated figures usually quoted. (SLD)

Three major methods of survey research, face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, and mail questionnaires, are compared with respect to the quality of the data. The literature on experimental comparisons of these methods is reviewed, and the effects of the mode of data collection on aspects of data quality are examined. The effects of the…

Conducting observational research in a cross-cultural context invokes a unique set of difficulties. This paper describes sources of bias and threats to validity that are specific to cross-cultural research. It describes problems of cross-cultural research designs for descriptive studies, comparative research, and experimental research and outlines…

Special problems confront the researcher measuring the attitudes of young children who cannot readily make cognitive judgments associated with conventional psychometric scales, such as Likert scales. One measurement strategy, called the method of paired comparisons, can overcome these difficulties. The method is explained in this paper. A small…

In an effort to learn more about the cumulative nature of psychological gerontology, an analysis was undertaken of professionally published articles dealing with psychological and related processes and listed in Shock's Current Publications in Gerontology and Geriatrics. Findings indicated a remarkable amount of noncomparable data. (Author)

Current U.S. policies toward Central American nations motivated this examination of the presentation of the region in 12 social studies textbooks. In order to determine if each text's treatment of Central America was representative of the entire book, three regions, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean were selected for comparison purposes. The…

In a longitudinal study, subject attrition constitutes a potential threat to the usefulness of data collected from subjects remaining in later waves of the study. If attrition is selective, then the sample at later waves of the study may be representative of a different population than that represented at the outset of the study. This study…

This paper inquires analytically about the connotative meaning of the terms poverty and learning as they function in the language of comparative education research. In the analysis of concepts, the analytical techniques used are the techniques of definition, explication, illustration, and substitution. Four conceptions of the term learning and…

Argues that while the study of comparative slavery deals with Blacks, it has so far, very little to do with Black or Afro-American history; the focus has been almost entirely upon the institutions and slave systems of the planters, and little attention is given to the lives or longings of the African population caught up in slavery and New World…