Evaluations that combine social science and law have tremendous potential to illuminate the effects of governmental policies and yield insights into how effectively policy makers' efforts achieve their aims. This potential is infrequently achieved, however, because such interdisciplinary research contains often overlooked substantive and…

Methodologists have written for years about the importance of attending to important details in quantitative research, yet there has been little research investigating methodological practice in the social sciences. This study assessed the extent to which innovations and practices are adopted by researchers voluntarily. In particular, I use the…

Argues that educational researchers analyzing multilevel data must identify appropriate sets of research questions at and within various levels of analysis and must specify appropriate models for analyzing the data. Covers problems, terminology, and measurement and statistical issues associated with multilevel research. (PGD)

Researchers who use the concept of school climate in their research should be aware of the ways in which climate can be measured and what the different methods of measurement imply. Among the typical kinds of measures of school climate currently in use are normative approaches that focus on students' and teachers' perceptions of school norms,…

The Austin Independent School District (AISD) is now in its third year of study on the effects of a new retention policy adopted in 1981-82. Reviewing the results of the first two years led to the conclusion that traditional methods of studying retention might not be the most appropriate. These evaluations have primarily focused on the impact of…

This paper examines those aspects of qualitative and quantitative research that might reasonably count towards effective educational research. The problem is addressed by examining their philosophical differences, their pursuit of objectivity, their approach to values, and the pursuit of reliability and validity. The possibility of rapproachment…

Partially replicates Elkind and Bowen's (1979) investigation of adolescent egocentrism. Studies the relations between imaginary audience and operational thought by testing children and adolescents on a Piagetian-based written test of operational thought and the Imaginary Audience Scale. (Author/AS)

Examined the validity of eight socioeconomic status measures as reported by adolescents and compared to information from their mothers. Found relatively high agreement between adolescents and mothers, supporting criterion validity. Found that most adolescent-reported measures varied systematically and in the expected direction with mothers' income…

The increasingly popular view of the counseling process from an interactional perspective necessitates the development of new measurement instruments which are suitable to the study of the reciprocal interaction between people. The validity of the Relational Communication Coding System, an instrument which operationalizes the constructs of…

Pratt's measure C on the class concentration of bibliometric distributions is calculated and interpreted for the laws of Zipf, Mandelbrot, and Lotka and geometric distribution, and comparisons are made of the results. An explicit mathematical formula which unifies disparate theories is derived and tested. (Author/CLB)

Presents aids to assist the design and monitoring of natural resource systems. Defines and describes hypergeometric systems; discusses monitoriing objectives and classifies monitoring programs. (MDH)

A study was conducted to investigate issues of test validation by placing them in a context. The study examined the ways in which instances of "good" and "poor" writing have been identified in the marking of part of an English writing test that is given each year to incoming Arts Faculty students at the University of Hong Kong.…

The term measurement has been used in a number of different sub-areas of psychology without an explicit recognition of the commonalities and potential differences in measurement characteristics. Analysis of these measurement situations reveals that the one common factor is that a mechanism or discriminative process, that is a standard system of…

An analysis of national programs for monitoring student achievement in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States finds that "national assessment" promotes a view of "standards" which is narrow, limiting, and definitely not conducive to the emergence of flexible and imaginative educational policies designed to cope…

This paper, for practitioners and researchers, is based on a computer search of the ERIC database and other references, and organizes and summarizes the literature on needs assessment in counseling, guidance, and personnel services. Following the brief introduction, a definition of terms used in the paper and a discussion of the purposes and…