Case study has been one of the most often used qualitative research methodologies in the field of education at all levels -- from preschool to adult. Yet the number of available resources for case study researchers--be they emerging or experienced--is still limited. This paper will review the definition of the case study method as well as some of…

Communicating complex concepts to practitioners, policymakers, and other nontechnical readers is a challenge that all policy researchers face. Research in education uses many concepts from methodology and statistics. If researchers want to communicate their findings to an audience of other researchers, they can safely assume that their audience is…

The continuously growing demand for program results has produced an increased need for evaluation capacity building (ECB). The "Integrative ECB Model" was developed to integrate concepts from existing ECB theory literature and to structure a synthesis of the empirical ECB literature. The study used a broad-based research synthesis method with…

Coburn and Turner (this issue) present an intriguing framework for understanding how data has come to be used in the current high accountability environments in education. In this framework, they connect various processes of data use within organizational and political contexts. Data use is presented using an ecological perspective that deepens…

Although acquisition criteria are a fundamental issue for SLA research, they have not always been adequately defined or elaborated in the literature. This article critically scrutinizes one such criterion, the emergence criterion, proposing an explicit, operational definition. After discussing emergence as a theoretical construct, the article…

Many organizations and agencies collect data related to postsecondary education. To improve the coordination of data definitions and surveys, guidelines have been prepared to define the best survey practices for data collectors and data providers. The first section of this document, "Best Practices for Data Collectors," covers the…

This text provides a solid introduction to the foundations of research methods, with the goal of enabling students and professionals in the field of applied linguistics to become not just "casual" consumers of research who passively read bits and pieces of a research article, but "discerning" consumers able to effectively use published research…

While inquiry teaching has been a popular term in the social studies literature over the last decade, the empirical research appears to have paid little attention to specific inquiry models. All published papers and dissertations purporting to measure inquiry teaching for the five year period, January, 1967 through November, 1972 are reviewed and…

This report, which is based primarily on figures released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), reviews the indicators available for international comparisons of vocational education and training (VET) to clarify the following issues: the kinds of comparability problems that exit, their extent and severity, their…

Anticipated demographic changes in the United States adult population in the decade between the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) of 1992 and the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which is scheduled for 2002, were reviewed. Next, the implications of those changes for the NALS and NAAL were analyzed. The analysis focused on births,…