Finding an unequivocable answer to the class size issue is vitally important to the future of American public education. Sorting out conflicting viewpoints and determining supportable conclusions are this report's primary purpose. Three factors--research motivation, the effects of confounding variables, and problems related to distinguishing…

L. A. Marascuilo and R. C. Serlin (1988) note that stepwise regression is a method used frequently in social science research. C. Huberty (1989) characterizes such applications as being "common". In support of this latter statement, a review of dissertations by B. Thompson (1988) demonstrated that dissertation students frequently use…

Social facilitation can be defined as the effect of an audience or coactors on performance. Research on social facilitation effects has produced some contradictory and confusing findings. Some studies have found that the presence of others enhances performance; other studies have found that the presence of an audience or coactors impairs…

Empiricists work with general concepts defined by their observed sets of objects. Their explanations involve their general concepts derived by trial and error from their untheoretical observations and experience. This paper distinguishes empirical educational research from scientific research to avoid confusion between the two. A reason for the…

Robert Coles' book "Eskimos, Chicanos, Indians, Children in Crisis" (1977) and Don Barnett's article "Attitudes of Eskimo School Children" (1973) attempt to present needed information on the values of Eskimo children. However, many of their findings are questionable due to poor methodology and interpretation. During summer…

This paper presents the author's responses to nine questions addressed to the standard-setting symposium participants. A central theme in this assessment is that one cannot clearly demonstrate, a priori, that either a normative or a content-referenced approach is superior. Most methods used to date have been insufficiently grounded in…

Developmental psychopathology can be viewed as a macroparadigm within which to integrate theoretical and empirical contributions stemming from other paradigms such as biomedical, behavioral, psychodynamic, cognitive, sociological, and family systems. By highlighting the interconnections among these different approaches and providing an overarching…

Focusing on the consideration of societal and developmental contexts in interpersonal communication research, this essay addresses two common problems: (1) that studies of dyadic communicative interaction do not refer to the larger issues of social change and stability, as if the macro- and micro-levels of analysis can be treated in isolation; and…

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how the combined use of qualitative and quantitative methods were necessary in obtaining within this society a clearer understanding of incest. The paper opens with a report of studies carried out on natural father and stepfather incestuous families, and this opens up the issue of the appropriateness of…

There appear to be four major schools of thought concerning adolescent depression: (1) depression as a clinical disorder is not possible before late adolescence or early adulthood; (2) depression in children and adolescents is a unique clinical entity, different from adult depression; (3) adolescents manifest depression in the same way as adults;…

The literature implicating the media as responsible for the contagion of terrorist violence has grown rapidly, but, under scrutiny, it appears to contain no credible supporting evidence and fails to establish a cause-effect relationship. Some students of terrorism have borrowed conclusions from the literature about the effects of televised…

Workers' education (WE) is that sector of adult education which caters to adults in their capacity as workers, and especially as members of workers' organizations. With regard to WE, the usual problems of collecting education are compounded for the following reasons: it has marginal status in the national educational systems; it is delivered by…

This review examines previous research on societal attitudes toward homosexuality. It notes that sex-role rigidity in society has an impact on societal attitudes toward homosexuality; in societies with rigid sex-roles, gay men and lesbian women are disliked and rejected more than in societies with liberal sex-roles. Society's stereotypes of gay…

The thesis of this paper is that the humanistic mode of inquiry is underemployed in evaluation studies and the future evaluation of Follow Through could profitably use humanistic approaches. The original Follow Through evaluation was based on the assumption that the world consists of a single system explainable by appropriate methods; the…

Two order theoretic techniques were presented and compared. Ordering theory of Krus and Bart (1974) and an extended Takeya's item relational structure analysis (IRS) by Tatsuoka and Tatsuoka (1981) were used to extract the hierarchical item structure from three datasets. Directed graphs were constructed and both methods were assessed as to how…