Review of service-learning research shows that, although sustained involvement improves civic development, few schools require substantial service hours. Sensitivity to type of placement makes a difference. Problems of definition and measurement of diverse activities hinder research interpretation. (SK)

Discusses the lack of a link between quality assurance and research in distance teaching institutions in India and in other developing countries. Focuses on two sets of quality requirements for distance open learning and recommends that institutions focus on research and not only dissemination of existing knowledge. (Author/LRW)

Review of studies using the Aging Semantic Differential to measure attitudes toward the elderly identified problems: familiarity and variety of objects, men-only design, and age of the instrument. Ways to refine it include updating adjectives and their positions, identifying attitudinal objects, and accounting for gender differences. (SK)

Looks at criticisms of public administration research: (1) knowledge in the field is not being accumulated, and (2) the research has low quality. Proposes meta-analysis as a solution to the first problem. Suggests that quality judgments should be based on knowledge cumulation, which acknowledges the value of all research methods. (Contains 48…

Presents two reasons for abandoning the false belief task as a methodology for theory of mind: (1) passing the false belief task requires ability other than theory of mind; and (2) theory of mind need not entail the ability to reason about false beliefs. Concludes with an alternative conception of the role of the false belief task. (Author)

Examined use and interpretation of logistic regression in leading higher education journals. Found increasingly sophisticated use for a wide range of topics; however, there continued to be confusion over terminology. Sample sizes did not always achieve a desired level of stability in parameters estimated, and discussion of results in terms of…

In the May 2001 "Educational Leadership," Stanley Pogrow wrote another article attacking the Success for All program and comprehensive reform. SFA has been highly evaluated in numerous studies and by 52 individual researchers. Pogrow is a competitor who believes his own program (Higher Order Thinking Skills) has been slighted. (Contains…

This paper considers possible problems researchers might face when interpreting the results of studies that employ variants of the preference procedure. Infants show a tendency to shift their preference from familiar to novel stimuli with increasing exposure to the familiar stimulus, a behaviour that is exploited by the habituation paradigm. This…

This Buckeye Institute policy brief sets out to document problems and inequities in charter school finance in Ohio, but it falls short in providing a comprehensive presentation of evidence. It ignores relevant research literature and extensive findings from the official state evaluation. It incorrectly assumes that charter schools serve the same…

How is the usefulness of research assessed as university research becomes more and more commodified? The question is addressed through an analysis of how the results of a particular research project were received in a large private company that had provided the main funding for a research project on gender and top management, a project based on…

This paper is based on the author's experiences of interviewing seven men and seven women who graduated from a Danish high school in 1980, at a moment when the upper secondary system underwent a process of democratisation. She questioned the informants as to the role education has played in their lives, and as to the sense their choice of…

This document describes the flaws in an October 2007 Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) report on public school choice and parental involvement, "Fixing the Milwaukee Public Schools: The Limits of Parent-Driven Reform." Because the report claims that public school choice and parental involvement have little effect on student…

Counterfactuals are routinely used in physical and biological sciences to develop and evaluate sophisticated, non-linear models. They have been used with telling effect in the study of economic history and American politics. For some historians, counterfactual arguments have no scholarly standing. They consider them flights of fancy, fun over a…

R. D. Howell, E. Breivik, and J. B. Wilcox (2007) have argued that causal (formative) indicators are inherently subject to interpretational confounding. That is, they have argued that using causal (formative) indicators leads the empirical meaning of a latent variable to be other than that assigned to it by a researcher. Their critique of causal…

Statistical reform in school psychology research is discussed in terms of research designs, measurement issues, statistical modeling and analysis procedures, interpretation and reporting of statistical results, and finally statistics education.