According to John Friedmann, planning is meant to mediate knowledge and action, providing a conceptual and operational linkage between a certain body of knowledge and a certain set of activities in the policy-making domain. This linkage articulates the knowledge needs of action and informs knowledge by translating and processing pertinent insights…

Program impact methodology--usually referred to as evaluation research--is described as it is developing in the United States. Several problems face the field of evaluation research. First, those issues grouped as "meta-scientific" include: (1) the distinction between qualitative and quantitative studies; (2) the separation of implementation and…

The effects of conditions of informed consent and disclosure on the performance of 84 students doing a statistics laboratory assignment for an introductory graduate course in statistics at a state university in the southeast were studied. Four separate classes taught by three instructors were included. Subjects ranged in age from 22 to 47 years,…

Research using measures of racial exposure has been appearing with increasing frequency in the literature on race relations. A methodological analysis finds the following problems with these measures: (1) they fail to characterize meaningfully the actual composition of sub-areas; (2) a particular exposure value can describe a wide variety of…

This paper reviews research on the relationship between infant temperament and maternal caregiving, and discusses conflicting findings. After emphasizing the central importance of independent measures in tests of interactions between temperament and caregiving, the paper reports two studies designed to clarify the relationship. In Study One, 48…

This monograph contains five papers based on issues that were originally examined at a National Association of Industrial and Technical Teacher Educators symposium that was conducted during the 1983 American Vocational Association convention in Anaheim, California. Included in the monograph are the following papers: "Research in Industrial…

This paper examines how educational comparisons might be used by the educational practitioners, and how the educator can contribute to the comparativists' work. Currently, it is argued, a gap exists between comparative educational study and the theory and practice of education. This leads to three areas of need. First, professional comparativists…

Hypothesis generation and testing is outlined as an additional domain for program evaluators. Program evaluation involves a thorough analysis of the processes that contribute to change (or a lack of change) among program recipients. This process of change is analyzed in two ways: (1) treating programs as naturally occurring field studies; and (2)…

This paper is based on the view that, although scientists rely on research values such as predictive accuracy and testability, scientific research is still subject to the unscientific values, attitudes, and emotions of the scientists. It is noted that undergraduate students are likely not to think critically about the science they encounter. A…

The dominant view of inquiry reflected in graduate educational research courses has been labelled as positivistic or quantitative. Instructional strategies have been designed to train students to become more skilled in the use of complex statistical procedures, more efficient in the development of preordinate designs permitting increasingly higher…

Although the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 does not specify the primary purpose of the Special Emphasis Program, it is generally categorized as serving a dual function of research/demonstration and service delivery. A General Accounting Office (GAO) review was held to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of the…

Problems associated with the analysis of data collected using the Solomon Four Group Design are discussed. The design includes an experimental group and a control group that have been pretested and posttested, and an experimental and a control group that have been posttested only. A sample problem is approached in three different ways. First, the…

As more and more writing process oriented teachers must oversee, design, and execute classroom intervention studies, a discrepancy arises from the inappropriateness of the process style to the product orientation of research. In establishing experimental procedures, researchers try to account for all variables, but for process-oriented teachers,…

The Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) Project conducted a study of the principals' role in managing change in their schools. The events in one school involved in implementing curriculum changes are described from an acculturation-based perspective. The term acculturation is used by anthropologists to describe the process of change resulting…

Sensitivity to assumptions concerning the applications of computers to education is needed, as educational practices are strongly shaped by both group and individual assumptions. An educational practice will not necessarily be improved if done by a computer. A consequence of searching for computer uses has been a tendency to build from computer…