Dissemination of educational knowledge to practitioners can best be improved by creating contexts in which practitioners are able to participate in the research and in the interpretation of the knowledge gained through the research. It is noted that the distinctions between researchers and practitioners are beginning to break down, largely as a…

Arguments and research studies examining whether people prefer arbitration or mediation to resolve a conflict between disputing parties are discussed, critiqued, and compared. In both mediation and arbitration a presumably neutral third party is involved, along with disputants, as an element of the dispute-resolution process. Mediation and…

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in its expansion of data reporting, should consider approaches for studying the curricular content of elementary and secondary instruction and student achievement of curricular goals. More specific information is needed about the curricular content of U.S. education. For example, data collected…

Building communication theory in terms of three-variable relationships is a promising route to developing better theory, because three-variable relationships stand midway between sometimes overly simplistic two-variable relationships, and the more complex path analysis. The analysis of three-variable relationships has been done in many previous…

This paper examines and critiques several learning style inventories (LSI) in an effort to find the optimal research instrument for a proposed empirical study of both the quality of courseware and the impact of courseware characteristics on variations of learning effectiveness due to learner characteristics. Five LSIs are examined: (1) Dunn LSI;…

This paper reviews critical issues in the assessment and modification of children's social competence and reports on preliminary data collected in a longitudinal study of children's social behavior. A number of unanswered applied research questions concerning assessment and modification of social competence are noted: (1) Specific behaviors of…

Fitting educational research to Latin America's developmental needs is a political issue involving differences in perspectives of Latin American and United States researchers, Latin American governments, and agencies concerned with development outside Latin America. A comparison of ERIC's "Current Index to Journals in Education" with the…

Four influential studies on school effectiveness reported by Brookover and Lezotte (1979), Edmonds and Frederiksen (1979), Phi Delta Kappa (1980), and Rutter and others (1979) are limited in their usefulness as recipes for creating effective schools by the following four issues: (1) The four studies differ in their definition of what…

In order for education to evolve from a craft to a profession, a spirit of inquiry must be infused into the beliefs and activities of education faculty members and practicing teachers. For faculty members in professional schools, the responsibilities of teaching, research, and service should be integrated activities for which inquiry serves as the…

This paper acknowledges that research on school dropouts presents problems in the definitions and computation of dropout indices. It considers a variety of methods for computing dropout rates, using dropout rates which are real and which were available at the end of the 1986-1987 school year. Fall enrollment, average daily membership, and total…

The National Center for Education Statistics supported this conference as a first step in a dialogue among forecasters to benefit all in the field. Fifty forecasters representing 20 different federal agencies attended the day-long session. Objectives of the conference include: (1) to bring forecasters together for a forum to share information on…

Research studies trying to understand, predict, and control dropout from distance education display various points of view and quite a few build on one another at a conceptual level, but their findings are rarely generalizable outside the situations in which the research is conducted. Although academics claim that new work on dropout should be…

The purpose of this study was to determine the types of research methods used to study cognitive processing development in gifted learners, from 1975-1986. Of 870 research publications identified on giftedness, 522 publications (60 percent) dealt with cognitive processing development. Research designs used most frequently were causal-comparative,…

High rates of learner attrition from courses continue to plague distance education institutions. As educational researchers continue to examine the attrition/completion issue, many measurement problems emerge. Focusing on Athabasca University, Alberta, this paper, part of a series produced by Project REDEAL (Research and Evaluation of Distance…

Cognitive aging research needs to clarify whether or not there are functional or ability declines with aging and, if so, to understand and mediate these declines. Recent research which has demonstrated declines in cognitive functioning with age has involved episodic memory and rehearsal-independent forms of such memory. It is not known how much of…