In April 1969, the year before school district reorganization, students in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania were given the 1965 version of the Stanford Achievement Test. In April 1976, the sixth year of desegregation, students were given the 1973 version of the Stanford Achievement Test. This paper presents seven charts comparing the 1969 scores in…

The study looks at the way in which survey research has helped at different stages in the life of the Open University in Great Britain. Since Open University students are studying at a distance, the major source of information about them and about the way they study has been from survey research. This research has provided an input to academic…

This paper reports the first results of a three-year longitudinal study of the social maps of children beginning the transition to adolescence. This exploratory study is guided by Bronfenbrenner's conception of the ecology of human development stressing the importance of a phenomenological orientation to development in the context of ecological…

The field survey procedures employed and the response rates obtained in the First Follow-Up Survey of the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS) are described. The first step in data collection for First Follow-Up involved an extensive tracing operation to update name and address files. A newsletter was mailed out to…

The National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS) is a federally supported longitudinal study of a national sample of some 23,000 young people first surveyed as high school seniors in the spring of 1972. The historical precedents of such a study include the work of Friend and Haggert in a Boston settlement house, Louis…

A research design is described which refines standard classroom observation schedules and techniques in order to reveal the social organization of schooling as the environment for processes of cultural transmission. The author believes a combination of longitudinal and cross-sectional study of classrooms and grade levels is the most effective way…

The idea of organizing courses on the "sandwich principle" of alternate periods of academic study and industrial training is described. Results of a longitudinal study conducted at the University of Bradford are provided throughout the report. Following background information on the sandwich principle, students' reaction to sandwich…

Research using Social Security data to measure the effects of government manpower training programs on the earnings of participants is discussed. Previous studies employed a longitudinal set of Social Security summary earnings records of over 50,000 individuals who participated in Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) institutional training…

A national random sample of over 14,000 high school seniors was studied with respect to socio-cultural differences in responses to cognitive test items. Six different cognitive tests and ten different groups were analyzed. The tests were: vocabulary, picture-number, reading, letter-groups, mathematics, and mosaic comparisons. The groups were:…

The influence of social class on students' entrance to graduate and professional education was examined by analyzing data from a large longitudinal sample. Students who did not go on to further study tended to come from less affluent and less well educated families, while students who went to professional schools came from wealthier and better…

To gain a longitudinal look at the censorship problem facing schools and librarians, an analysis was made of the 110 requests for reconsideration of library or instructional materials that were processed by the reconsideration committee of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Community Schools from January 1971 through May 1981. The school district has had a…

Some research has theorized that the student role is a central part of adolescence, and that failure in this role threatens adolescents' self-esteem. Derogative self-esteem may provoke delinquency as a defensive response. To test this theory a longitudinal study was designed to compare the effectiveness of three alternative school programs that…

In l975, a longitudinal evaluation was begun of the New York State Experimental Prekindergarten Program to determine its effects on children's cognitive and non-cognitive development. The population consisted of 5,000 disadvantaged 4-year-olds enrolled in the program. The study provides evidence that the program had a general effect, not…

This study used 152 grade eight students ranging in age from 12 to 14 years from a suburban middle school in central New Jersey. The investigations gave particular attention to the identification of variables that represent understanding of fundamental mathematical structures. The first year of the research took place during the 1978-1979 school…

The data obtained from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 was used to yield estimates of the total number of instructional hours in each of the academic areas over a 3 year period. Rates of exposure to industrial arts and commercial courses exhibited large sex differences and small racial differences. Both white and…