A brief and simple guide discusses the place and purpose of coding experimental data in the research process. The trade-offs involved unitizing data are reviewed; it is noted that a decision that increases reliability may reduce the validity of results, but without reliability there will be no validity at all. A discussion of categorizing data…

Classroom observation has the potential of obtaining valuable information regarding teacher and child behavior. This study examines the accuracy of observers coding a standard stimuli. In this procedure the observer's bias is examined, as well as the confidence that can be placed in the observation code itself. Through these procedures the exact…

The Classification of Secondary School Courses (CSSC) is a coding activity to translate the diverse course titles which appear on transcripts and master schedules of students into common terms, permitting meaningful comparisons to be made about these students and allowing secondary school coursework to be considered as a coherent factor in…

The reliability of coding problems associated with observation studies is discussed. The purpose is two-fold: a) to examine coding reliability by applying the profile method to two coding occasions separated by a lengthy time interval with the object of determining both within-occasion reliability (agreement) and between-occasion reliability…

Summarized in this report are the activities undertaken in the development of the Classification of Secondary School Courses (CSSC) for the National Center for Education Statistics' use in coding transcripts of high school students. Fifty-two secondary school course catalogs selected from those collected in the High School and Beyond study…

The possibility that "coder drift" may be a source of bias in classroom observation systems was investigated in two parallel experiments using the Flanders System of Interaction Analysis. Coder drift may be described as the differences in coding which result when observers create their own idiosyncratic systems of classifying teacher…

The results of two experiments support the hypothesis of "coder drift" which is defined as change that takes place while trained coders are using a system for a number of classroom observation sessions. The coding system used was a modification of the low-inference Flanders System of Interaction Analysis which calls for assigning…

Two predictors of coding performance were validated when 26 trained subjects used the Flanders System of Interaction Analysis to code 11 half-hour videotapes of fifth grade classrooms. The Teacher Evaluation Scale, a high-inference rating system based on the Global Rating Scales, was also used. The predictors were scores on a shortened form of the…

This report describes the third year of the national Follow Through Classroom Observation study. The aims of the study were: (1) to assess program implementation at one site for each of 12 sponsors; (2) to search out the relationships between child outcomes and teaching-learning processes; and (3) to estimate which programs incorporate processes…

Observer reliability and the confusability of codes, two sources of error in the collection of classroom observational data, are examined. Confusability is defined as the extent to which one code is mistakenly recorded as another code. Observational data were collected in each of 172 first grade and 171 third grade Follow Through and comparison…

Findings from the Student Attribute Study, a two-year investigation designed to identify student characteristics and behaviors related to teacher expectations and attitudes are reported. Children in grades two through five who received consistent teacher rankings over a two-year period on one or more of 13 bi-polar scales describing student…