While most practitioners and researchers support the recent policy direction for increased parent involvement in their children's education, little consensus exists about what constitutes effective parent involvement. A major source of this confusion is the lack of scientific rigor in the research upon which practice and policy is based. This…

A think-aloud protocol study examined changes in real-time cognitive, metacognitive, and motivation processing that may have resulted from reading-strategy training. Eighth-grade students participated in 4 weeks of reading-strategy training during social studies class. Students used their own social studies text during the training. Fourteen…

Findings of a study that determined the ways in which practicing administrative course developers utilize instructional design activities in their design projects are presented in this paper. A survey was administered to 30 participants in a training and development group within a large organization and mailed to 43 other practicing instructional…

This paper summarizes the experiences of a teaching psychologist who is frustrated with the lack of resources for research at rural colleges. Rural college administrators often reject proposals for psychological research, choosing to commit their institutions purely to teaching. Because psychological laboratories are too expensive for marginally…

A descriptive study was conducted to identify the problems met by university department chairs and describe the most common methods for dealing with them. The data were gathered by both qualitative and quantitative methods using a national survey of 808 department chairs (with a 70.2% response rate) as well as a series of semi-structured…

This paper addresses issues in the use of facilitated communication with persons having severe communication impairments, including autism. The research on facilitation is summarized, indicating that the vast majority of studies have found no evidence of communication but have found evidence of facilitator influence on the communicator's response.…

The term "statistical significance" is often misunderstood or abused to imply a large effect size. A recent example is in the work of J. P. Rushton (1988, 1990) on differences between Negroids and Caucasoids. Rushton used brain size and cranial size as indicators of intelligence, using Pearson "r"s ranging from 0.03 to 0.35.…

The following papers are included: "Social Classification of Women's Work" (Benn, Burton); "Developing Models of Learning from Experience" (Boud, Walker); "'Research Reflecting Practice?'" (Edwards, Usher); "Metaphors and Their Implications for Research and Practice in Adult and Community Education" (Hunt); "'Common-Sense' Approach to Reflection"…

The status of statistical sophistication in research on vocational education in the 1980s and changes in the degree of sophistication were studied. Analyses were made of 118 quantitative research articles published in 4 vocational education research journals (28 articles in the "Journal of Vocational Education Research," 50 articles in the…

A group of 56 randomly selected members of the International Council for Distance Education who were based in Australia were surveyed regarding their opinions on distance education research priorities for Australia. A five-page questionnaire was used to gather biographical details about respondents and opinions regarding available level of…

A June 1992 survey was conducted to determine the number of teenage mothers receiving Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC) who were participating in the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program of the Family Support Act of 1988, and who were receiving education, job training, and child care. Some of the findings from the statistics gathered…

Educational research on the factors of student achievement has been limited by its failure to consider the multilevel or hierarchical nature of most data. This study used a nonexperimental regression-based procedure, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), to empirically develop a predictive model of fifth-grade achievement in reading and mathematics…

Research on language in Hong Kong is reviewed, focusing on work in the areas of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and survey research. Discourse analysis studies examined include research on classroom language, discourse in other settings such as work environments, business telephone communication, news media discourse, and student language…

A limitation of the principal components method is its scale dependence. This note shows that the method is scale invariant if the normalization is modified in an obvious way. Then the effect of a change in units is as transparent as in linear regression, and principal components can be used without apology. Most researchers who use multivariate…

A population data set was randomly generated from which a random sample was drawn. This sample was randomly divided into two data sets, one of which was used to generate parameter estimates, which were then used in the second data set for cross-validation purposes. The best variable subset models were compared between the two data sets on the…