This occasional paper updates and extends earlier papers in the Monitoring the Future project. It provides a detailed description of the project's design, including sampling design, data collection procedures, measurement content, and questionnaire format. It attempts to include sufficient information for others who wish to evaluate the results,…

This book attempts to clarify the nature of principles that govern the effective use of merging new research designs in mathematics and science education. A primary goal is to describe several of the most important types of research design that have been pioneered recently by mathematics and science educators, have distinctive characteristics when…

This chapter presents the following discussions on the issues of interpretive research: (1) finding quality criteria that pertain to the quality of interpretive research; (2) determining authenticity criteria for interpretive research; and (3) and providing an example of the procedures employed and the outcomes of an intensive interpretive study…

This chapter discusses the way that mathematics curricula are developed in the United States. It suggests that curriculum development in mathematics education makes little progress because it fails to adhere to scientific methodology. Weaknesses in the current development process, how such development can become scientific, how curriculum…

This chapter discusses three different approaches for the use of the history of mathematics and science in educational research. These approaches require increasing levels of scholarly engagement with historical materials and offer correspondingly increased levels of insight. Each of the three techniques includes brief examples of historical…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been the subject of many evaluations during its history. Those evaluations are reviewed, focusing on external evaluations, and the influences of recommendations made in the evaluations are discussed. The report concludes that many of the recommendations of evaluators have been heeded by…

A two-stage design provides a way of roughly adapting item difficulty to test-taker ability. All test takers take a parallel stage-one test, and based on their scores, they are routed to tests of different difficulty levels in the second stage. This design provides some of the benefits of standard computer adaptive testing (CAT), such as increased…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the model used to evaluate the two-year Allegany Grant between the Peace Education Foundation and the Miami-Dade County Public Schools that focused on reducing school violence through implementing the "Peace Works" program. A mixed method design using simultaneous methodologies was employed. For…

This report deals with cognitive research conducted on the Teacher Listing Form (TLF) of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) of the National Center for Education Statistics. The SASS is a set of 10 self-administered questionnaires designed to provide information on all aspects of the school system. The TLF is the first of the 10 surveys, and is…

The purpose of this study was to examine patterns of computer use in U.S. schools and the relation of computer use to academic achievement in mathematics, reading, and writing. The report discusses methodological issues and presents the results of analyses of the social distribution of computer use and the relation of computer use to academic…

This paper summarizes the details of a workshop which sought to bring together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and university educators to consider the current state of knowledge about emergent and early literacy learning, with the overarching question: what additional knowledge is needed about early literacy learning? Six specific topic…

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which is being developed for administration in 2002, will determine the status of adult literacy in the United States and serve as a follow-up to the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey. Three discussion groups consisting of a total of 23 literacy researchers, users of the 1992 survey, potential…

This guide provides assistance to K-12 educational practitioners in evaluating whether an educational intervention is backed by rigorous evidence of effectiveness, and in implementing evidence-based interventions in their schools or classrooms. The guide is organized in four parts: (1) a description of the randomized controlled trial and why it is…

The Texas Successful Schools Study examined the educational practices, school characteristics, and educator characteristics that contributed to the success of seven high-performing elementary schools with high proportions of limited-English-proficient (LEP) and economically disadvantaged students. This technical manual further elaborates the…

This study tested the common assumption that lists of instructional objectives (LIOs) presented at the start of a lesson are used as advance organizers (AOs). Because traditional research designs have yielded conflicting results, an alternative design was used that sought to falsify the necessary association between the objectives and their use…