The volume focuses on topics discussed at a symposium on research methodology in special education, with emphasis on the special educator's perspective. Following an introductory section (three chapters), are three sections with 17 chapters which cover the following topics: design of educational prescriptions--behavioral objectives and criterion expectancy levels; implementation and evaluation of educational prescriptions; diagnostic-prescriptive teaching and the Guilford structure-of-intellect model; diagnosis, labeling, and expectancy effects; evaluation of curriculum and instruction; accountability--measuring teacher effectiveness; considerations in standardized testing; innovations in testing--criterion-referenced measurement; reporting pupil progress; research utilization; complementary roles of descriptive and inferential statistics; implementing a research design with internal controls; matching and choice of appropriate control groups; reliability in special education measures, error of measurement, representative scores, and confidence intervals; measuring change; statistics--peculiar problems caused by the nature of special education research; covariance and regression to the mean; and research design and methodology--results of an older conference. A final chapter consists of a topical index with codes for such information as discussants' names and whether there are two or more sequential pages of related discussion. (SBH)