This book examines much of the large body of research on educational inequality in Britain since the Second World War, focusing on studies concerned with inequalities in the internal organization and functioning of the schools. A social constructionist approach to the study of social problems as a way of providing a reflexive perspective on the…

It is argued that judgments in evaluative research are ultimately subjective, but that good criteria are available to assess their quality. One of these criteria is the robustness of the judgments against incompleteness or uncertainty in the data used to describe the educational system. The use of the robustness criterion is demonstrated through…

This paper describes a project at Arizona State University West to generate a collection of narratives to be used in professional teacher education and to examine ways narratives and narrative research techniques could be used with students. The first half of the paper lists members of the research team, their individual concerns, how they came…

This paper contends that the survey research approach is limited for generating substantive data to improve college teaching, because it is impersonal, lacks opportunities for probing, suppresses the idea of discourse by offering fixed-choice and yes-no questions, disregards respondents' social and personal contexts of meaning, and is dependent on…

This book contains edited versions of papers from a symposium on adult development and a final integrative chapter. The following papers are included: "Introduction" (Jack Demick, Patrice Miller); "Influences of World View on Personality, Epistemology, and Choice of Profession" (Melvin Miller, Alan West); "Developmental Conceptions of Good Work: A…

Integrating information from local school district and community data sources is essential to understanding the relationships between them. A major problem in merging such data concerns the geographic incongruities of the boundaries of school districts (local education agencies) and the boundaries of communities. This paper focuses on resolution…

Using a personal anecdotal style, this paper describes ethical conflicts that occurred during a study conducted in a kindergarten classroom in which the researcher was a passive observer. The paper is framed around an incident observed by the researcher in which a kindergarten student was stigmatized as an outsider and mistreated by his peer…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) recently expanded its national survey to include state representative samples on a trial basis. In 1992, the NAEP undertook studied non-response in the trial assessment through two simulation projects. The first looked at state assessments that were similar to NAEP tests for states with low…

The progress of an Improving the Efficiency of Educational Systems (IEES) Project initiative toward developing a prototype indicator system for tracking the overall education systems in participating countries, is described in this interim report. Two needed dimensions were identified during the development of the model: (1) incorporate…

A follow-up study sought to determine what happened to the 1990 noncollege-bound graduates of all the high schools in Somerset County, New Jersey. Data were gathered through a mailed survey and telephone follow-up (approximately 45 percent response) of the 408 graduates of the 12 of 13 high schools providing names. Some of the findings from…

For a number of years, the California community colleges have used data from annual statewide surveys conducted by the Kern Community College District and the California Community College Trustees (CCCT) for comparative faculty salary information. Both the Kern and CCCT studies rely upon the device of selecting benchmark points (such as the…

This presentation describes research on families with mentally retarded children, focusing on trends since 1983, the year that family research issues were reconceptualized in a paper titled "A Model of Stress, Coping, and Family Ecology" by Keith Crnic and others. The trend analysis concentrates on four issues: (1) the magnitude of the impact of…

The term "underclass" is often used to describe concentrations of inner-city Blacks in urban neighborhoods where social problems are common, mostly in large metropolitan areas. The most widely used empirical measurements of underclass are the spatial concentrations of poverty and social problems. Characterizing the underclass as almost entirely a…

This volume presents in one collection a systematic inventory of research and analytic procedures appropriate for generating information on knowledge production, diffusion, and utilization, gathered by the University of Pittsburgh Program for the Study of Knowledge Use. The main concern is with those procedures that focus on the utilization of…

Parents, educators, psychologists, and linguists are concerned about the effects of bilingualism on children, particularly young children. Although it is generally agreed that the minority-language child should develop bilingual and bicultural competence, there is disagreement concerning the role the two languages should play in the child's early…