There is a growing need for instrumentation which can enable us to observe and compute phenomena that take place in time. Although problems of observation, computation, interpretation and categorization vary from field to field and from problem to problem, it is possible to design an instrument for use in any situation where time-variables have to…

This book is a collection of fourteen papers presented at the communication colloquium of the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee, during the 1967-68 academic year. The essays have been organized into three sections. Section I: "General Perspectives on Communication" contains presentations which are addressed to basic theoretical and conceptual…

The article describes and illustrates data collection methods useful in establishing social interaction objectives for improving the quantity and quality of parent social interactions with their handicapped infants. Among these are visual analysis of relationship patterns across intervention sessions, and the use of percentage for describing…

Discusses the number of observations necessary to obtain a trustworthy sample of classroom transactions by reanalyzing existing data. Eleven to twenty observations appear necessary for teachers' questions which require students to hypothesize. The reliability of a single observation was zero for four other questioning types. (CC)

Developmental research and educational practice involve conversations between children and adults. The conversational aspects of these situations have rarely been occasions for reflection. Discrepancies between the child's expectations and the adult's intentions can lead to misunderstanding, for example, at school or during a research interview.…

The Stanford Research International (SRI) classroom observation system provides a description of the classroom environment with emphasis on interactions between teachers and students and among students. Included in the SRI observation system is the Five Minute Observation (FMO), which records classroom interactions into "frames"…

A study sought to determine the stability of student/teacher interactional gymnasium behavior over one academic year. The design of the study was a single-subject, time-series analysis. The subject was a male elementary school physical education teacher with 14 years of experience. Data were collected using the Cheffers Adaptation of Flanders…

This paper describes data gathering and analytic procedures, and then presents examples regarding how each fits into the naturalistic research model. From the interactionist perspective, called symbolic interactionism, meaning is of central importance. Naturalistic inquiry is a way of doing social science research which provides the methodological…

A study was carried on for 2 years in a predominantly Italian-American suburb near Boston. During the period of data-collection, the researchers observed both classroom interaction in a kindergarten/first grade and the interactions of two members of that class at home with their families. The analysis is an attempt to discover what factors in…

Underlying the current use of ethnography in the study of teaching and learning is the assumption of an analogy between the school or classroom and culture. The claim of educational ethnography is that it discovers and describes the ways that members of the school community create and share meaning. Ethnographers aim to discover the operating…

The papers in this collection were initially presented in two successive conferences that dealt with the collection, use, and reporting of spoken language for educational research. The ten papers deal with the method and procedures used in studying talk in a school situation; an analysis of the interaction between the researcher and a group of…

An ongoing investigation of the process of reading diagnosis and remediation based on a theory of clinical problem solving called the "inquiry theory" has been undertaken by the Clinical Studies Group at the Institute for Research on Teaching. A review of several observational, computer simulation, and training studies conducted as part of the…

The application of hermeneutic theory to the study of the oral history interview is proposed in this paper. The first section of the paper indicates why the oral interview is central to the approach of the oral historian; it then defines oral history as a communicative process and suggests an approach to investigating the oral interview that uses…

This paper describes five experimental studies which explored the influence of fathers' home caregiving and interactional characteristics on their infant's laboratory behavior. Approximately 300 families with children ranging in age from 6 to 24 months were studied. Each infant's reactions were observed as a function of the manipulation of the…

This study sought ways in which the staff and students of a School of Architecture could work with townspeople, teachers, and teenagers in studying the environmental conditions in their communities. Three types of communities participated. Three types of programs were carried out. They were: (1) townspeople, school personnel and teenagers studied…