Four ethical problems resulting from a fieldwork study of elementary education student teachers are explored. The problems include: acquiring permission to execute the study; how far to dig into personal lives to extract necessary information; the pitfalls of doing collaborative research; and how much information can be revealed without…

A study was conducted at Los Angeles Pierce College (LAPC) to test the relative reliability of small-sample telephone interviewing and large-sample mailings with postcard and telephone reminders for student follow-up. The study involved conducting a telephone survey of 245 former students who had enrolled at LAPC in four program areas, and a mail…

An understanding of how children interact with reading material in educational settings is crucial to the understanding of successes and failures in teaching children to become skilled readers. This report describes the development of a plan for observing, describing, and coding reading activities in a representative sample of classrooms. The…

This paper reviews the reliability of several efforts by educational researchers to determine variables in teacher behavior that influence student attitudes and achievement. In particular, works by Rosenshine (1971), Dunkin and Biddle (1974), and Rosenshine and Furst (1970) are examined and evaluated in terms of research criteria developed by…

The effects of using different data analysis methods on estimates of treatment effects of educational programs were investigated. Various regression models, such as those recommended for Title I program evaluations, were studied. The first effect studied was the amount of bias that might be expected to occur in the various settings. Results…

This document is part of a series of chapters described in SO 011 759. Working from the premise that temporal analysis is indispensable for the study of change, the document examines major alternatives in research design of this nature. Five sections focus on the features, advantages, and limitations of temporal analysis. Four designs which…

This technical document, part of a series of chapters described in SO 011 759, describes a basic model of panel analysis used in a study of the causes of institutional and structural change in nations. Panel analysis is defined as a record of state occupancy of a sample of units at two or more points in time; for example, voters disclose voting…

This document is part of a series of chapters described in SO 011 759. The chapter advocates the analysis of event-histories (data giving the number, timing, and sequence of changes in a categorical dependent variable) with maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) applied to log-linear rate models. Results from a Monte Carlo investigation of the impact…

With an emphasis on the problems of control of extraneous variables and threats to internal and external validity, the arrangement or design of experiments is discussed. The purpose of experimentation in an educational institution, and the principles governing true experimentation (randomization, replication, and control) are presented, as are…

Some of the problems that occur for researchers using the TICCIT computer assisted instructional system are described. The underlying learning strategy of the TICCIT system states that the student rather than the developer is best able to select the order of instructional frames. In order to successfully engage in research with the TICCIT system,…

In this paper it is suggested that current research methods are of questionable validity as they pertain to minorities, but that this problem may be solved by encouraging more minority input into the conceptualization, organization, and implementation of surveys that affect them. All phases of survey research are discussed in detail. Planning…

A method is described by which cognitive structures in verbal data can be identified and categorized through numerical analysis and quantitative description. Transcriptions of interviews (in this case, the verbal statements of 40 researchers) are manually coded and subjected to analysis following the AaO (Agent action Object) paradigm. The texts…

Inadequacies in the quality and quantity of human services for Northeastern rural area residents prompted the seminar from which these transcripts are derived. Presented via chronological order, these transcripts reflect development of a framework and methodology for analysis of community service systems. Major seminar objectives are identified…

The Randominzed Response Technique was used with 83 undergraduate students in an Introductory Statistics course to: (1) demonstrate a means by which information of a sensitive nature can be obtained in a confidential manner; and (2) illustrate to a group of somewhat skeptical students an application of statistics to an interesting, real-world…

An investigation was conducted of the characteristics of two estimation procedures and corresponding test statistics used in the analysis of completely randomized factorial experiments when observations are lost at random. For one estimator, contrast coefficients for cell means did not involve the cell frequencies. For the other, contrast…