This paper describes two researchers engagement with two teachers as they taught a middle grades mathematics course, Current Events Math, in a large urban school district. The researchers share bits of data and their ethical entanglements as they entered into the site to find the truth about what works in middle grades mathematics classrooms only…

The Total Survey Error (TSE) paradigm provides a framework that supports the effective planning of research, guides decision making about data collection and contextualises the interpretation and dissemination of findings. TSE also allows researchers to systematically evaluate and improve the design and execution of ongoing survey programs and…

Historically, responses to the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) were required to be collected by self-administered paper or online questionnaire to be eligible for official analysis. CEQ responses collected by telephone were excluded from the final analysis file to minimise the potential for bias due to mode effects: systematic variation in…

Some of the most important evaluation questions cannot be answered through experimental research. The "assessment" of the St. Louis Leadership Program (SLLP), sponsored by the Danforth Foundations, is used as an illustration of a "connoisseur-based study" approach to evaluation. The project team, given limited time and funds, decided that it could…

Narrative data yield rich detail, insight, and information, but the personal and situational characteristics of coders (called value inertia and cognitive limitation biases) can affect data reduction. The effects of coder exposure to expected project outcomes and the level of coder research methodology sophistication were investigated. Coders,…

The value of the grounded theory approach to inquiry for the study and practice of higher education is discussed. It is suggested that there is a need to identify approaches to inquiry that maintain scientific validity while revealing meaningful responses to the complex problems of higher education. An approach that may be employed for this…

The development of procedures by which test publishers can screen individual purchasers to minimize the possibility of test misuse is described. The Test User Qualifications Working Group (TUQWoG), an outgrowth of the Joint Committee on Testing Practices, was formed to address the prevention of test misuse through improved methods of screening…

Young children acquire a knowledge of, and beliefs about, gender-roles at a rapid rate. A total of four studies were conducted to examine some of the factors thought to mediate the impact of examiner's sex on children's gender-typed activities and cognitions. The first two studies looked at children's ratings of videotaped male and female adults…

Two studies examined the hypothesis that negative evaluators will be perceived as more intelligent than positive evalutors. Two types of stimuli were used: excerpts from actual negative and positive book reviews, and versions of those excerpts that were edited so that the balance of the reviews varied but the content did not. The results strongly…

Considers the doubts the author has had about the design of an award winning study, focusing especially on a researcher's obligation to help the teachers with whom the researcher is working, even at the risk of jeopardizing a study's design. Traces the way that her engagement with that question has led to her current professional commitments. (SC)

Frequently, the behavior of researchers reflects important and otherwise unrecognized aspects of the phenomenon which is being studied or evaluated. In other words, the "processes" of the researcher are "parallel" to the "processes" of the entity being studied. These parallel processes are illustrated with examples…

The focus of this paper is on women with respect to three themes: the reasons why women are attracted to ethnographic research, the problems they may encounter in making this choice, and the prospects for women researchers to influence the future direction of educational research. Four interrelated psychological aspects seem to attract women to…

Analysis has become especially challenging as researchers become more aware of their positions as subjective participants as well as analysts of their own research projects. Four female researchers involved in a study of gender and literacy analyzed their own disclosures from the recent past, and found the concepts of subjectivity, transaction,…

Two college educators, one a philosophy teacher, the other, a composition teacher, undertook a naturalistic study of students' initiation in an introduction to philosophy course. The philosophy teacher found it difficult to articulate his disciplinary ways of knowing, and both researchers had trouble identifying their tacitly held views of…

The susceptibility of observations of adult-child interactions to bias due to the physical attractiveness of target persons was examined. Facial features of target persons were occluded in one version of a videotape and unoccluded in another, otherwise identical version. Using a global rating system and a molecular coding strategy, 38 trained…