The objective of this monograph is to contribute to the further understanding of the knowledge-production-and-utilization process. Its primary focus is on a model both general and detailed enough to provide a comprehensive overview of the diverse functions, roles, and processes required to understand the flow of knowledge from its point of origin…

Four types of control groups are commonly used in cognitive manipulation studies: (1) no-treatment; (2) practice with own methods; (3) practice and training with competing treatments; and (4) practice and training with irrelevant treatments. There are problems associated with the use of each group as a baseline for identifying the "true"…

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a model of the psychological processes that take place when a persuader decides to use or not to use a given persuasive message. The assumption is made that if the perceived emotional impact of a message is more positive than an ethical threshold (which varies from person to person), the persuader will use…

Budgetmaking and bargaining are central resource allocation processes in schools; this study examines how they affect one another. Ethnoscientific techniques were applied in nine Illinois school systems. The results were analyzed to show the flow of the decision process and construction of detailed plans of action. The structure and power…

Threats to the validity of the Title I Evaluation and Reporting System are covered in two parts: an annotated bibliography of reports concerned with technical issues, and a discussion of threats to validity--from the reporting system in general and from each model in particular. Threats common to all three evaluation models are reported:…

Based on the premise that the major emphasis in population education should be on the development of problem analysis and values clarification, the manual offers guidelines for program evaluation. It consists of eight chapters. Chapter I discusses the nature of educational research and in-school and out-of-school population programs. Chapter II…

These proceedings contain six conference papers with commentary and discussion: (1) Dell Hymes, "On Communicative Competence," (2) David McNeill, "How to Learn a First Language," (3) Wayne O'Neil, "A Theory of Linguistic Performance," (4) William Stewart, "Social Dialect," (5) Paul Cohen, "Some Methods in Sociolinguistic Research," and (6) S. Alan…

The articles comprising this bulletin report the status of research methods in the English language arts and indicate promising directions for further effort. Ralph C. Staiger discusses the range of language arts research and points out the strengths and weaknesses of various research techniques. Theodore Clymer examines the essential…

Several methodological issues related to second language acquisition research are considered, and a two-part study is discussed that addresses issues related to data collection, i.e., how and how frequent, and data analysis, i.e., the appropriateness of the statistical tools, the justification of inferences and the comparability of results based…

Both administratively and in terms of their evaluations, Head Start and Follow Through have been treated as separate programs. Follow Through was initially conceived, however, as an effort to preserve and augment Head Start gains. In this report, achievement test data on a set of children who participated in both Head Start and Follow Through are…

This document is intended as a resource guide for institutional researchers, based on the experience of the Johnson County Community College (Kansas) Institutional Research Office. It includes pragmatic suggestions concerning research design and research problems which are incorporated into discussions of research questions, reporting data,…

The paper discusses problems faced by policy makers in utilizing social science research in decision making on educational issues and problems. The term social science research is interpreted as including both educational evaluation and educational research. The history of social science research and critical issues associated with social science…

An argument is made against the use of school averages as composition measures by documenting the non-random nature of peer associations and by presenting evidence that different students are influenced by different reference groups. The structure of friendship associations among some 20,000 students in the McDill Twenty High School Sample is…

This paper presents a discussion of issues raised in the evaluation of Project Follow Through reported by Abt Associates. The paper suggests that many of the problems inherent in the design of both the program and the evaluation stem from the underlying assumption that one educational model could be found which would best alleviate the educational…

A broad search of the scientifically relevant literature on television and human behavior began in the fall of 1973 and extended over a year; the search concentrated on the literature since 1960, although it attempted to include all significant earlier works. In addition, special emphasis was placed on obtaining very recent, hard to locate, and…