Although most community college faculty are not engaged in research, community college settings can provide research opportunities for those faculty members determined to overcome the considerable obstacles. At Whatcom Community College, in Washington, for example, constraints facing faculty seeking to conduct research include limited access to…

This paper discusses several considerations and techniques in doing research which attempts to measure the effects of visual images on viewers. For example, to describe precisely the effects of some element of a visual image or series of images, researchers must be able to specify the institutional context in which the image is presented and…

Community colleges generally conduct little research. Further, there is no generally accepted national research agenda for community colleges, no consistently funded national agency charged with studying the institutions as unique entities, and few educational researchers directing their attention toward them. The research that is undertaken on…

Although public acceptance of Head Start is high, public understanding of what the program does remains limited. Studies of Head Start to date have been insufficient in quantity and scope. In November 1994, the Roundtable on Head Start Research began a series of discussions of new directions for Head Start research. The roundtable looked at…

In Pioneer Institute's November 1995 "Dialogue," nine school-choice advocates critiqued a draft manuscript of "Who Chooses, Who Loses? Culture, Institutions, and the Unequal Effects of School Choice," edited by Harvard professors Richard Elmore, Gary Orfield, and Bruce Fuller. This publication contains the response of Professor Fuller to the…

Researchers in vocational education (VE) often are not viewed as having made substantial contributions to VE practice. The VE literature and the poor attendance at American Vocational Education Research Association sessions by vocational educators are evidence of the gaps that have developed between VE research and practice, basic and applied…

A majority of the empirical studies on questioning has focused on the effects of prior knowledge on the number and type of questions asked. Research has not been able to find support for the frequency hypothesis and the specificity hypothesis in questioning. The focus of these studies is briefly criticized, and a detailed critical assessment is…

The Bean and Metzner Nontraditional Undergraduate Student Attrition Model appeared to be a good model to address community college student attrition because it takes into account the environmental variables that colleges must consider to enhance persistence. A study was conducted to determine how well the Bean and Metzner Model fit with community…

Two studies appear to reach unsatisfactory conclusions regarding causes of low math achievement among American Indians. Leap (1988) studied math problem-solving strategies among low-math-achieving fourth- and fifth-grade Ute reservation students. He concluded that faulty or cumbersome problem-solving strategies were directly linked to Ute language…

The main purpose of this paper on a study of Indonesian concepts of human nature is to demonstrate practical instances of cooperation between Western and Third World researchers. It is asserted that Western researchers must understand the general views of human nature held by individuals in Third World countries before they can apply theories in…

After a decade of dormancy there is suddenly a great interest among educators and policy-makers in public school finance, spawned by: successful court decisions in several states overturning existing state public school finance formulas; a popular book alleging more severe educational segregation than in 1954; congressional proposals for school…

Too few researchers understand what statistical significance testing does and does not do, and consequently their results are misinterpreted. This Digest explains the concept of statistical significance testing and discusses the meaning of probabilities, the concept of statistical significance, arguments against significance testing,…

The inherent methodological problem in conducting research at multiple sites is how to best derive an overall estimate of program impact across multiple sites, best being the estimate that minimizes the mean square error, that is, the square of the difference between the observed and true values. An empirical example illustrates the use of the…

A review of literature examining how children are affected by women's employment was conducted. The review focused on the changes during the past two decades in the general approach of the researchers, with a specific focus on researcher bias and use of theory. First, literature reviews from the past three decades were conducted. Second, the work…

The analysis presented here focuses on different problem situations extracted from everyday interactions in which individual developmental changes of the child interfere with well-established interaction patterns of the family. These problem situations require conjoint mastery of two objectives: (a) successful integration of the child into the…