The long-forgotten debate of 1929-31 between T. L. Kelley and W. H. Kilpatrick is reviewed with the aim of reviving the crucial, but dormant, issue of the competence of quantitative empirical research to answer educational questions. They debated the need to supplement scientific method with a philosophical approach sensitive to needs, impulses,…

Employing a background information questionnaire, a policy preference scale, and the Kluckhohn Value Orientation Scale, 40 American Indian tribal leaders and 35 Anglo administrators from 4 North Dakota reservations were surveyed to explore preferences for problem-solving approaches in the field of child welfare. The following hypotheses were…

This paper is a partial report on a three-year field experiment in participatory educational planning in a suburban school district. It is shown that teachers, administrators, parents, and students, working voluntarily with technical support as a "collateral organization" within a district, can substantially broaden the scope of…

To assist the human factor psychologist in predicting the human resources requirements based on the introduction of a new technology, a study was conducted to locate and apply an existing method, or to develop a new procedure for quantifying the effects of incoming technology. Five steps were taken: search and critical analysis of recent…

Increasingly, schools are being asked to be explicit about what they intend to accomplish, how they are going to accomplish their intents, and how well they have succeeded. This training unit seeks to assist school personnel in one of the essential phases of these three tasks, that of translating long-range educational goals into usable objectives…

Three evaluators with different backgrounds and interests were involved in a program evaluation at Cornell University's Center for International Studies, where two of the evaluators had serious conflicts and the third served as an in-house mediator. The third evaluator questioned why he had credibility with the first two, looked at how he…

Middle and upper class 3- and 4-year-old children were exposed to three consecutive 5-week treatment conditions in the naturalistic setting of a half-day laboratory nursery school program. During the first treatment condition, the teacher emphasized low level cognitive questions; during the second, high level cognitive questions; and during the…

Specific criteria for the rating of each questionnaire item are stated in detail. The teacher is asked, after reading the questions carefully, to assign each kindergarten student a rating for every question. This rating should be based on a personal knowledge of the student. The booklet is divided into three sections with section 1 focusing on…

The School Personnel Utilization Project developed a series of modules to assist school personnel in building the necessary skills for the development of organizational change strategies and collaborative, collegial, educational problem solving capabilities. This specific module is on the concept of shared decision-making and its application to…

In this paper, the principal of a high school in Eugene, Oregon, describes the impact of the adoption of collaborative decisionmaking procedures in his school. The collaborative decisionmaking experiment began in 1970 with an organization development (OD) intervention intended to train the school faculty in communication skills, group processes,…

This preschool program offered a highly structured curriculum in which language development was fostered through encouraging verbal responses in a game format context. The curriculum, based on skills and concepts required for success in elementary school, included language arts, reading readiness, mathematical concepts, science, and social…

This technical report is in three parts. Part I is a conceptual treatment of communication in which the human being is viewed as a goal-attainment system. The goal-attainment problem is defined as a discrepancy between the current state of the system and a specified goal state. Several forms of the communicative relationship are outlined. Part II…

The document considers several unfortunate cycles: (1) belligerent students cause desperate teachers, who cause more belligerent students; (2) ineffective parents cause bewildered youth who never take advantage of existing opportunities and who create, in turn, more bewildered children; (3) browbeaten tenants cause callous landlords to neglect…

Knowledge of the importance of mediating processes for sustaining performance, and of self-organizing abilities for learning to perform a given task, served as the basis for a method (called TASKTEACH) of using a time-sharing digital computer to assist learning of prescriptively-guided or problem-solving serial-action tasks. The students involved…

Conducted during 1967-68 at four high schools in a large Midwestern city, this study sought to locate adults with counselor potential and to generalize as to their personality attributes. The Counselor Situation Analysis Inventory (CSAI), requiring no previous knowledge of counseling, was administered to 536 teachers. A special Student Crisis…