After a decade of dormancy there is suddenly a great interest among educators and policy-makers in public school finance, spawned by: successful court decisions in several states overturning existing state public school finance formulas; a popular book alleging more severe educational segregation than in 1954; congressional proposals for school…

Too few researchers understand what statistical significance testing does and does not do, and consequently their results are misinterpreted. This Digest explains the concept of statistical significance testing and discusses the meaning of probabilities, the concept of statistical significance, arguments against significance testing,…

The inherent methodological problem in conducting research at multiple sites is how to best derive an overall estimate of program impact across multiple sites, best being the estimate that minimizes the mean square error, that is, the square of the difference between the observed and true values. An empirical example illustrates the use of the…

A review of literature examining how children are affected by women's employment was conducted. The review focused on the changes during the past two decades in the general approach of the researchers, with a specific focus on researcher bias and use of theory. First, literature reviews from the past three decades were conducted. Second, the work…

The analysis presented here focuses on different problem situations extracted from everyday interactions in which individual developmental changes of the child interfere with well-established interaction patterns of the family. These problem situations require conjoint mastery of two objectives: (a) successful integration of the child into the…

Funded in 1979, the Administration for Native American Research Analysis Project (ANARAP), had three primary objectives: (1) to create a computerized data base of the past decade of research about Native Americans (including American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Hawaii natives), especially research concerning natural and human resource…

The complexity of the school consultation field points to the need for review of the current state of the field. To further understanding of the content and methodology utilized in consultation research, a content analysis of research articles published over the last 12 years considered the following areas: type of consultation, subject matter,…

In the 1960s, mental health and educational research on minority populations suffered from ill defined studies which lacked empirical quality and validity. As a result, numerous misinterpretations, false assumptions, and misleading stereotypes have been perpetuated in the literature. Generalization of results from small, non-random samples, and…

In order to stimulate scholars to investigate systematically and fully the religious dimension of dramatic television content, the first part of this paper develops a basic framework for such study. After establishing the importance of this kind of research, it defines and explains the four basic variables that would have to be examined: general…

The problems of classroom teacher-conducted research are examined with reference to a particular case study. The case study involved a field test of "A Practical Guide for Advanced Writers in ESL" over a semester in two sections of an intermediate English as a second language (ESL) writing class for college-bound students at the University of…

In this investigation, methodological and substantive issues regarding early mastery motivation (also termed competence motivation and effectance motivation) were examined longitudinally using a primarily middle-class sample of 37 children observed at 1 and 3.5 years of age. Data on cognitive competence and mastery motivation were collected in…

Regardless of the techniques, model specifications, time periods, and data sets used, studies on the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on the duration of unemployment of individuals all indicate that UI prolongs spells of unemployment and lowers employment among its recipients. Unfortunately, the magnitudes of these estimated effects…

The purpose of this project was to identify and gain consensus among vocational educators regarding their perceptions of the most critical research goals and the most critical research problem areas in vocational education personnel development. The Delphi technique was used in the three rounds of the survey. The first round requested lists of the…

The problems arising from treating word and sentence complexity as the direct causes of difficulty in comprehension are surveyed in this paper from the perspective of readability formulas. The basic choices and assumptions made in the development and use of readability formulas are discussed in relation to the larger question of text…

The process of focus-finding in qualitative research is ongoing and dynamic, involves researcher choices and decisions (rather than pure discovery), and is a process of social construction in which the researcher interacts with the research setting. Focus-finding is discussed in the context of a qualitative research study of the integration of…