Paper presented at the Thirty-Fourth Annual Groves Conference on Marriage and the Family, Boston, Massachusetts, April, 1968.

Many consider the use of adjunct questions (mathemagenics) to be a means by which the instructional value of a text can be increased with relatively little difficulty, and this explains the appeal they have generated over the years. Yet this appeal is seldom tempered by a consideration of the ecological validity of the experimental studies on…

The paper focuses on the relationship between educational research and educational policy, specifically the influence that "affirmative actions" in the policy arena can have not only on the nature of educational research but also on the kinds of participants (e.g., minority persons and women) in the educational research enterprise. A…

Literature reviews dealing with psychotherapy and counseling too often conclude that no conclusions can be drawn. However, a critique of the literature on covert sensitization (CS) may offer clarifications of these apparently contradictory remarks. Research studies (N=84) were categorized by problem types, method used in the investigation, method…

The literature and typical approaches to reducing attrition among college students are critiqued, and a strategy for the identification of different interventions likely to have positive effects on retention rates of different student subgroups is proposed. It is claimed that a small sample approach to empirical testing of the combinations of…

This brief paper was prepared as a starting point for employers considering the adoption of a new management initiative for working parents. It is not an exhaustive outline of all considerations in the decision-making process, nor does it provide solutions to all the known pitfalls. It does, however, suggest the potential scope and complexity of…

Problems associated with combining observations taken from intact classrooms were examined. Clarification of basic entities to be studied was a critical step in research planning. Classroom observers usually study instructional arrangements and other classroom phenomena. The author used activity structure and its component activity segments as the…

Educational outcomes are affected by student level, classroom level, and school level characteristics. The fact that educational data are multilevel in nature poses serious analysis questions. Though strong arguments can be made for focusing on a single level of analysis, such studies have several basic limitations: the choice of analytic level…

Intended to aid media and other technical specialists who lack training in ethnographic research to understand what ethnography is, what ethnographers do, and how they, the media specialists, can be of most assistance when working on a team conducting such research, this paper discusses the nature of ethnographic research and issues involved in…

Several models for enrollment projections have been developed based on past performance. One of these, a computer-assisted model developed at the California State University at Northridge, was tested for possible use at Los Angeles Pierce College (LAPC). From three to five previous comparable college terms are used in the model to predict…

Research in law-related education has not led to cumulative knowledge that is of much use to curriculum developers or classroom teachers. Among the reasons for this state of affairs are that researchers concentrate on nonessential topics, educational research does not generally meet criteria for scientific research, educational research is too…

Besides identifying current problems in educational change research, this document describes the inadequate paradigm on which past research has been based and outlines a currently emerging paradigm of educational innovation. The author asserts that previous research findings have been inconsistent and not comparable. Basic to the research problems…