This study investigates the level of agreement among four groups--students, parents, teachers, and administrators--in reference to a particular set of school objectives: the teaching of social studies in secondary schools. Twelve objectives for social studies teaching were given to the four groups for rank ordering on a five-point scale of…

Analyzes problems in the use of cohort data as illustrated by cohort data on drinking alcoholic beverages taken from American national surveys conducted during the late 1950s, late 1960s, and late 1970s. Researchers are cautioned that all available "side information" should be considered before statistical cohort models are tested. (Author/RC)

Accounting for verbal reports requires explication of the mechanisms by which the reports are generated and influenced by experimental factors. We discuss different cognitive processes underlying verbalization and present a model of how subjects, when asked to think aloud, verbalize information from their short-term memory. (Author/GDC)

Reviews the issue of outcome criteria in the light of the relevance-rigor dimension. Counseling psychologists must find a more liberalized approach to research methodology upon which to construct human understanding. Inappropriate methods of data anlaysis are often used in multivariate research. A model for such experiments is suggested. (JAC)

Using research findings and statistics to support a policy argument often leads to misinterpretations and exaggerations of public school performance. Two experts illustrate this point by discussing examples of distorted high school drop-out rates, student performance on standardized tests, and international comparisons of U.S. and Japanese…

Principals in the information age need to be information driven, committed to shared leadership and relentless about continuous improvement. They must reshape the processes, norms, and behaviors of teaching and learning around aggregating and interpreting shared information. In this article, the authors discuss the role of a principal in shaping…

Global economic transformations have never been as dramatic as in the twentieth century. Most countries have experienced radical changes in the standards of income per capita, technology, fertility, mortality, income inequality and the extent of democracy in the course of the past century. It is the goal of many disciplines--economics, history,…

In 1990, Milwaukee (Wisconsin) became the site of the first publicly funded school-choice program providing low-income parents with vouchers that could be used to send their children to secular, private schools. An evaluation of Milwaukee's school-choice experiment was conducted by a team of researchers, headed by John Witte at the University of…

Abuses and misuses of statistics are frequent. This digest attempts to warn against these in three broad classes of pitfalls: sources of bias, errors of methodology, and misinterpretation of results. Sources of bias are conditions or circumstances that affect the external validity of statistical results. In order for a researcher to make…

Dropout rates for American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) are higher than those of other racial/ethnic groups, but the overall or national AI/AN dropout rate is not known. In an attempt to generate a national rate, data were collected from 26 state departments of education, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and tribally controlled schools;…

Existing qualitative studies of school principals suffer from procedural or conceptual shortcomings that result in failure to clarify the principal's instructional role. This paper describes the methodology and procedures of a year-long, multimethod, multilevel field study of 12 school principals. First, the background for the study (the…

The general goal of this paper is to help researchers conduct appropriately designed goodness of fit studies for item response model applications. The specific purposes are to describe: (1) an up-to-date set of promising and useful methods for addressing a variety of goodness of fit questions; and (2) current research studies to advance this set…

Research on reading teacher effectiveness has taken several different directions over the past 30 years: during the 1950s and most of the 1960s, research focused primarily on teacher qualities; in the early 1970s attention shifted to the effect of the teaching process on student learning, while in the late 1970s and early 1980s experiments defined…

A study of Arizona vocational education follow-up systems was designed to survey problems in and promising practices for developing information systems to provide useful data for decision making. Interviews with state, county, college, and school district personnel revealed that the major problem faced by those conducting follow-up studies at both…

Two innovative methods for collecting and analyzing qualitative data are vignettes and pre-structured cases. Vignettes are descriptions of situations or problems written by a professional, with a suggested outline and comments provided by a researcher. Advantages of this method are strength of impact of the written descriptions and efficiency of…