This paper reports a systematic literature review examining empirical studies on the effects of peer assessment for learning. Peer assessment is fundamentally a social process whose core activity is feedback given to and received from others, aimed at enhancing the performance of each individual group member and/or the group as a whole. This makes…

Methods for recording information derived from focus groups are described as follows: (1) transcribe the entire discussion from a tape; (2) expand reporter's notes by using a tape; and (3) work from reporter's notes only. Three approaches are also suggested for synthesizing the discussion into an accurate text. (SLD)

Nine types of errors occurring in the process of synthesizing research are described, with examples from a recent synthesis of research on teacher professional growth. Types of errors include excluding relevant literature, wrongly reporting details such as sample size, erroneously attributing findings to studies, and stating unwarranted…

The six articles of this issue discuss the place of meta-analysis in the health professions and present two state-of-the-art meta-analyses using a variety of innovative methodologies, statistics, and secondary analytic procedures. A survey conducted for this issue and its sequel explores interventions to facilitate meta-analysis. (SLD)

The external audit is a way of assessing the trustworthiness of a study, attesting to its dependability from a methodological standpoint and to its confirmability by reviewing the data, analysis, and interpretations and assessing whether the findings represent the data accurately. This paper discusses issues in the audit process, drawing on data…

In the fall of 1995 the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) held a conference to stimulate dialogue about future developments in the fields of education, statistical methodology, and technology and the implications of these developments for the nation's education statistics program. This paper summarizes and synthesizes the results of…