Considerations of validity that are central to all disciplines in the social sciences are discussed, and concepts that are an essential part of the intellectual equipment of the social sciences researcher are systematically analyzed. Fundamental methodological concepts underlying decisions made in the research process are highlighted to encourage…

This paper describes an experiment in using the "scenario," a concept parallel to that of the case study, as a research tool for obtaining information about possible sex discrimination in personnel decisions by high school principals in South Australia. A review of the literature indicated that in spite of legislation aimed at…

This School Research Newsletter presents the research program of the National Swedish Board of Education (NBE), as adopted by the NBE Board of Directors in June 1982. The successive decisions on decentralization taken in the educational sector since 1976 have led also to a decision to alter the thrust of the research and development work within at…

Efforts to achieve greater decentralization, deregulation, and management by objectives in the public sector have left an indelible mark on the school sector in Sweden during the 1980s. The experimental scheme of local agencies and free municipalities illustrates two such reforms. Under the free municipality experiment, a number of municipalities…

This UNESCO newsletter contains six sections concerned with various aspects of population education. Section 1 deals with workshops for monitoring and evaluating population education programs. Section 2 evaluates the programs of six Asia-Pacific countries (China, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, India, Pakistan, Philippines, and Thailand).…

This newsletter describes a research design enabling descriptive, comparative, evaluative follow-up studies of individual development in social contexts related to schooling. In addition, it describes a research project focusing mainly on evaluative studies of the ability of the educational system to confer, on different individuals in various…

The seven articles of this special issue comment on the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Assessment Reading Literacy Study conducted from 1989 to 1991 in 31 countries. Project design and test instruments are reviewed, and results from the Nordic countries are presented and explored. (SLD)

Five papers discuss Australian education research. Issues explored include: (1) public versus private education; (2) access to and participation in higher education; (3) teacher self-evaluation; (4) test equating methods; and (5) a procedure for analyzing classroom dialogue. The validity of end-of-school assessments and the nature of teaching are…

The public sector in Sweden is under pressure to augment its productivity and cut costs, and the education sector is faced with the same demands. Most people believe that adequately proportioned, efficiently operating schools are essential to Sweden's long-term economic development, but this is seldom mentioned in connection with spending cuts. In…

Modern school research in Sweden has shown that the old selective school has been slowly transformed into an elective school, which in many ways resembles the old selective school with its parallel education systems. It is known that social background and a number of other variables (sex, nationality, type of class, etc.) have a crucial bearing on…

This issue was developed in preparation for the 1987 International Congress on Environmental Education and Training and contains suggested elements for an action plan for the 1990s to be drafted as an outcome of the conference. A major portion of the document discusses nine objectives for inclusion in the proposed plan. These are: (1) the…

This collection contains 24 articles dealing with career counseling and related research. Included in the volume are the following articles: "A Management Approach, Function and Counselling in Guidance/Application in the Federal Penitentiary Environment," by Pierre Dodier; "A Description of the Alternate School in Prince Albert,…