This book is the product of a forum titled New Research Directions and Paradigms, held at the Congress of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Mental Deficiency in Australia in August 1992. The book presents 13 chapters, all written within a critical paradigm for disability research which critiques the reification of…

This volume is a longitudinal study that explores the responses of two experienced high school English teachers to curriculum changes and examines how a teacher's past attitudes and experiences influence current practice. There are six chapters. The first is a discussion of narrative inquiry as a research method. The next two chapters are…

A brief overview is provided of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) program of the National Center for Education Statistics, and areas of research or survey evaluation in which work is ongoing or planned are described. The SASS is an integrated system of surveys of public and private schools, school districts, school principals and…

The returns on continuing vocational training (CVT) in enterprises were examined through a review of research on the returns on employer-provided training. A search of "Econ Lit," ERIC, and other databases identified more than 90 publications on the topic. Twenty-one publications examining the relationship between training inputs and…

Prince George's Community College (PGCC), Maryland, utilizes a geo-demographic marketing model in which neighborhoods within the college's service area are grouped into natural socioeconomic "clusters." In an effort to track the outcomes of PGCC students 4 years after entrance and to compare outcomes by the different socioeconomic…

This study examined the extent to which data are available for 77 indicators for all students, including students with disabilities, at the school completion level. Data managers from 36 states or territories reported that data are available for indicators in the Presence and Participation domain and the Contribution and Citizenship domain, but…

An important purpose of the Schools and Staffing Survey of 1987-88 and the Teacher Followup Survey was to provide data useful for analyzing teacher demand and supply. This report summarizes the important issues related to teacher supply and demand; presents descriptive statistics on supply and demand; and develops and tests multivariate models to…

This bulletin examines some questions that arise when children are not ready for promotion: Should they be retained? Who decides? Are there alternatives to retention? What is the effect of retention on the student? Despite research limitations, those who examine the studies on grade repetition say they show that grade retention does not have a…

This final volume of a six-volume study of an elementary school called "Kensington" in a school district code-named "Milford," examines its own assumptions and procedures. After the brief, introductory chapter, which presents the methodological appendixes of the preceding volumes as a serial, chapter 2 discusses exploratory and…

In 1989, the Center for the Study of Community Colleges received a grant from the Ford Foundation to assist community colleges in defining their transfer rates and collecting data to support those definitions. The Center invited 240 community colleges with at least a 20% minority enrollment to participate in a Transfer Assembly. Interested…

The practice of interviewing individuals rather than groups has been based largely upon methodological concerns for preventing contamination of data. The assumptions that (1) the data provided by individuals can, in aggregate, yield social truth; (2) individuals are conscious of social phenomena; and (3) the whole of social reality is equal to the…

Developments in higher education that have significance for the next few years (1987-1989) are discussed, based on a review of the published research in Western Europe and the Americas. Three propositions derived from the currents of research on higher education are briefly considered: (1) a demanding force for higher education comes from…

South Carolina's School Incentive Reward Program Program (SIRP) based on year-to-year gains in reading and mathematics achievement, which seemed to have face validity, was evaluated, particularly its use of the relative gains of students in only the highest grade in the school as the basis for the awards. When this requirement was relaxed so that…

The behavioral and social sciences offer the best perspective on changing individual and group behaviors and stopping the spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Social psychologists interested in basic research and/or theoretical issues have an opportunity to study naturally occurring independent variables. A potential area for…

"Minority children" experience a lot of shifts in their cultural contexts. The author's work as a professional teacher in multicultural classes enabled her to focus on the research questions presented in this article. These questions concern the need for some minority children to achieve equal opportunities in the Norwegian educational…