This article offers a rationale for the contributions of qualitative research to evidence-based practice in special education. In it, I make the argument that qualitative research encompasses the ability to study significant problems of practice, engage with practitioners in the conduct of research studies, learn and change processes during a…

The report of the national response to intervention (RTI) evaluation study, conducted during 2011-2012, was released in November 2015. Anyone who has read the lengthy report can attest to its complexity and the design used in the study. Both these factors can influence the interpretation of the results from this evaluation. In this commentary, we…

Research and scholarship into educational effectiveness research (EER) is comprehensively reviewed from the UK, The Netherlands, the US, Cyprus, Belgium, Sweden, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and other societies, dating from the field's origins in the 1970s. Issues include its history, methodological and theoretical advances, scientific…

Presents an attempt to cross-validate a widely used set of standard credibility scales. Finds that the Meyer modification of the Gaziano-McGrath scales appears to validly and reliably measure credibility per se but that a second set of scales posited to measure community affiliation is not sufficiently reliable in its current form for use without…

Discusses research in creativity with particular emphasis on the problems encountered in assessing creativity from a life-span developmental framework. Alternative developmental models and measures are discussed as future research recommendations for the assessment of life-span creativity. (Author/RH)

Reviews and evaluates existing self-report and interview measures of childhood and adolescent depression in terms of their characteristics, advantages, and limitations. (MP)

Reviews 26 instruments developed to assess temperament at the infant, preschool, and school-age levels, giving particular attention to instrument content, standardization samples, reliability, and validity. It is concluded that, at present, no single psychometrically adequate instrument is available. Suggestions are made for future approaches to…

This article discusses evidence for functional behavioral assessment (FBA) procedures in terms of the meaning and interpretation of different forms of reliability and validity in FBA. It concludes that additional research needs to be conducted with various target behaviors across different settings to support the continued use of FBA. (Contains…

This article highlights three common problems with assessment research, including the following needs: (1) to adopt a hypothesis testing approach; (2) for research to be guided by available formal and informal theory, and (3) for research to be consistent with general school psychological practice. New research methodologies and new research…

This paper reports 20 unsolved problems in educational measurement and points toward what seem to be promising avenues of solution. The first group of concerns involves validity, posing the problems of obtaining suitable validity criteria, determining and measuring the predictor variables that best characterize the traits and proficiencies of…

Examines methodological and conceptual issues related to the study of the effects of parental depression on children, focusing on the need to develop measures of relational behavior that are well-validated in high risk samples; relational assessments focused around central motivating systems; and methods that describe a variety of individual…