Children of families in the Showmen's Guild of Australasia have traveled throughout Australia for generations as their families followed show circuits. Educational provision for these children has varied enormously in the past. In 1992, the Queensland Department of Education assigned three teachers at the School of Distance Education (Brisbane) to…

This report discusses the findings of a study that attempted to investigate the participation rates of students with disabilities in the Oregon statewide testing program. The study joined individual student data from the Oregon Statewide Assessment Program and the Oregon Special Education Child Count to examine participation rates. The report…

The methods and findings of studies of the effects and value of preschool education and compensatory education programs, such as Head Start, are reviewed. After introductory comments on ideological controversies and on terminology, section 1 focuses on evaluative studies of the immediate and long-term effects of preschool education and early…

The purpose of this paper is to offer an alternative explanation of why the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, and educational research in general, has such a low status and its connection to education reform is so remote. Emphasis placed on the differences that divide reformers, researchers, and educators instead of similarities that…

This preliminary study investigated the perceptions of the research process of teachers who had newly become researchers and, in particular, it sought to explore the relationship between teacher-conducted research and professional growth. Six experienced English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers were…

Existing qualitative studies of school principals suffer from procedural or conceptual shortcomings that result in failure to clarify the principal's instructional role. This paper describes the methodology and procedures of a year-long, multimethod, multilevel field study of 12 school principals. First, the background for the study (the…

The Berkeley Reading Tests Project has selected as its principal object of study standardized tests of reading comprehension. The interest is in the assessment of such tests, with respect to their performance as measures of the reading comprehension abilities of school children. A serious study of the assessment of reading comprehension requires…

Ego development data were collected from two groups of subjects. One group consisted of 175 students from junior high, senior high, and college. The second group was comprised of 136 adults who were either teachers and administrators of a medium-sized public school system, or long-time employees of a large chemical manufacturing corporation.…

To investigate the coping skills and adaptational outcomes among elderly survivors of the holocaust and a comparison group of aged individuals who did not endure extreme stress requires overcoming several methodological challenges. First, stress must be defined to include the personal meaning or evaluation of the sources of stress and its…

The research literature on aging was reviewed to determine findings with direct implications for educational programs for older persons and findings with no direct application but that raise further research questions. The focus was on cognition and learning in later life, predominantly on work published during the past two decades in major…

On the one hand, the social science tradition of imitating hard scientific methodology has led to a situation in which much research has little to offer the real and complex world of the practicing teacher. On the other hand, some educators measure education by the angle of students' heads and the quality of their graffiti in the washroom. Most…

Profound changes taking place in communities and in universities are bringing researchers and community members new opportunities for joint research endeavors and new problems that must be resolved. In such partnerships, questions about shared decision making--about the ethics of collaboration--arise at every stage: Who decides which problems are…

Recent trends indicate increased interest in the education and training of the labor force. However, information in the extent of on-the-job training (OJT) is complicated by conceptual difficulties, such as the informal nature of much OJT, lack of reliable cost data on formal training, and the fact that many studies based on stratified samples…

Already a standard technique in anthropology, the life history method is widely used in the development of oral and local history, and within educational and social science research the method is growing in popularity. This is in large part due to the growing respectability of qualitative research in general. Part I of this paper explains the life…

This document reports on a study of the likelihood of individuals participating in the Federal food stamp program and the Medicaid program and the likelihood of exiting those programs. Data were analyzed from the first panel file of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Special problems with representativeness and measurement…