Describes government funding of university-based research in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Examines problems in research evaluation and related public policy, particularly the link between evaluation and funding, issues of efficiency and incentive compatibility, and impact of performance evaluation on researcher behavior. Appendix…

A former editor of this journal, 1985-88, selects an outstanding article from his tenure that addresses the pervasive influence of perceptions on educational practice and research. The article selected examines the influence of perceptions on behavior, accuracy of perceptions, capacity of individuals to express perceptions, perception processes,…

Practices identified by experts as critical variables in eliciting writing samples were checked against 12 randomly selected studies using holistic ratings to derive descriptions of inferential statistical results for described samples. The studies often lacked precise information about these variables, limiting understanding of writing evaluation…

Substantive and methodological problems encountered in a five-year synthesis of research on college impact are discussed, including general issues in higher education research and scholarship, relevance of assessments of student change, unnoticed indirect effects of college experience, inattention to individual differences, validity of common…

This commentary on EC 605 442, which indicated long-term gains for children with autism who experienced intensive behavioral intervention as preschoolers, questions the magnitude of the student changes and their significance, because of concerns about the representativeness and comparability of the sample group and the failure to measure skills…

This commentary on a study reported in EC 605 442, which indicated long-term gains for children with autism who experienced intensive behavioral intervention as preschoolers, criticizes the outcome measures used in the study as inadequate in determining whether normal functioning in cognitive, emotional, and adaptive functioning was achieved as…

Reviews research done in conjunction with educational reform in the Soviet Union, highlighting the work of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. Criticizes research for short-sightedness, lack of coordination, and failure to unite theory and practice. Delineates shortcomings and calls for greater integration and a broader, more creative vision for…

Secondary school earth-science textbooks in print from 1960 through 1979 were examined to determine how rapidly concepts of plate tectonics were incorporated into those texts during the period when scientists' views about these concepts were evolving most rapidly. Suggests that delays were probably due to an unwillingness to engage in speculation…

An experiment compared group oral protocols of 37 native English-speaking subjects enrolled in a fourth-semester college French course making grammaticality judgments in English and French. Results indicate the subjects do not necessarily use the same strategies in rendering grammaticality judgments in first and second languages, casting doubt on…

Studied efficiency differences in Finnish senior secondary schools by Data Envelopment Analysis, using four variant models. Average efficiencies in the most extensive models were 82% to 84%. Considering parents' educational level increased average efficiency to 91%. Tobit analysis showed school size did not affect efficiency. Input and output…

Criticizes the research design in "The Small ICF/MR program: Dimensions of Quality and Cost" (Conroy), that found small Intermediate Care Facilities (ICF) for individuals with mental retardation are inferior to other community programs. Discusses the problem in selecting a control group on the basis of pretest matching. (CR)

This paper is an "evaluation" study in the form of an extensive "case study" of one particular business school in Greece. Its alleged contribution focuses on the conclusions it hopes to draw in relation to the evaluation research methodology, based on the case evaluation research, experimenting with the use of students' ratings…

In policy research a frequent aim is to estimate treatment effects separately by subgroups. This endeavor becomes a methodological challenge when the subgroups are defined by post-treatment, rather than pre-treatment, variables because if analyses are performed in the same way as with pre-treatment variables, causal interpretations are no longer…

Decision making in the public sector encompasses many topics of interest to the academic researcher--environmental issues, health and human services, budget planning, and so on. Expertise in data collection and analysis is critical to the policy-making process and can be provided by academic researchers. But the "real world" policymaker…

The EERJ roundtable took as its point of departure the experience of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) in carrying out policy research. CERI has conducted four reviews of national educational research and development (in New Zealand, England, Mexico and…