Three factors are considered that contribute to the perception that the higher education research effort has done a poor job in dealing with problems confronting academe. The first factor is the magnitude of the higher education enterprise and the number of problems and issues inherent in it. The second factor is the level of support for research,…

Part of a study on the link between LD (learning disabilities) and delinquency, the paper summarizes the literature on the prevalence of handicapped juveniles in the justice system. Following a review of methodological limitations in the literature, the paper summarizes findings about the prevalence of emotional disturbances, mental retardation…

Covert checks of observational methodology reveal declines in reliability of observations. This appears to be particularly true when complex codes are used to track social interaction. The present study was undertaken to see whether reliability could be maintained through a combination of technological advancements and the development of improved…

Reasons for the glaring gaps in recommendations for humanities and social science emphasis in the National Commission on Excellence in Education report, "A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform," are examined; and remedies are proposed. It is important to recognize that only 4 of the Commission members represented the…

This book evaluates methodologies in epidemiologic and related studies for obtaining measurements of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). The book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses physicochemical and toxicological studies of environmental tobacco smoke, including physicochemical nature of smoke and in vivo and in…

This paper details the pathway of development of early intervention program evaluation research along with the often-enumerated problems with research results. Early intervention evaluation, which was initiated in 1969, involves those organized efforts designed to remediate and/or reconcile developmental disabilities in young children up to the…

The purposes of this paper are to consider how the prototypical research design of day care studies may unjustifiably emphasize day care as the effective factor or "treatment" in children's development, and to describe processes by which the family or some interaction between the family and day care may also affect preschoolers'…

This paper compares five growth measures using the High School and Beyond database. The measures are: (1) simple gain (posttest minus pretest); (2) difference between group means; (3) percentage of students who scored higher on the posttest than the pretest; (4) percentage of items missed on the pretest which are subsequently answered correctly on…

Two questions are addressed in this document: What is worth knowing about Project Follow Through? and, How should the National Institute of Education (NIE) evaluate the Follow Through program? Discussion of the first question focuses on findings of past Follow Through evaluations, problems associated with the use of experimental design and…

The purpose of the present investigation is to examine the influence of sample size (N) and model complexity on a set of 23 goodness-of-fit (GOF) indices, including those typically used in confirmatory factor analysis. The focus was on two potential problems in assessing GOF: (1) some fit indices are substantially influenced by N so that tests of…

In popular culture, the word "research" is a term of reverence--in academe it is virtually a mantra. Research in any field may wish to seem detached and objective, but it is always political, whether it involves launching rockets or teaching writing, and it depends on a crisis mentality to support it. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, that…

This report discusses the current state of research into the visual effects of screen layout design, i.e., the arrangement of design elements on a screen. First, two types of design elements are described: technical (those things that engineers work with and that users have little or no control over), and comprehensibility (those elements that a…

K.E. Ferguson's analysis of women's place in capitalist society and the concurrent elevation of bureaucratic structures seriously challenges administration analysts. According to Ferguson, modern bureaucracy requires constant maintenance in reifying its dominance structure and locating and suppressing opposition. This analysis can be applied to…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the methodology of empirical counseling supervision articles published from 1981 to 1987. Seventy-five studies met the criteria for inclusion. Fifty-five articles included adequate information about at least one inferential statistical test to permit computing eta(sup 2), epsilon(sup 2), power, and…

This brief review of research examines the mail questionnaire as a research tool. Major topics reported are the advantages and disadvantages of mail surveys response rates, and questionnaire construction. Among the advantages reported are ease of distribution and tabulation, the possibility of a large sample and geographic range, low cost,…