This chapter presents the shift in perspectives about schooling embodied in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM) Standards-based reform movement, describes the impact of these shifts on the types of questions that need to be answered, and defines the ways in which scholarly evidence needs to be developed. Issues of concern…

This chapter elaborates on some guidelines for and methodological variations of action research approaches to the study and creation of change in mathematics education. Focus is on the interplay between evolving research on and change in mathematics practice that occurred in schools and classrooms of experienced high school mathematics teachers.…

This report describes and evaluates the methods and procedures used for the field test of the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B:2000/01). The B&B:2000/01 field test included important changes from previous B&B surveys (conducted in 1994 and 1997) in its sample design and collection of data. The introductory chapter…

The purpose of this study was to track teachers using Astronomy Village (registered) over 2 school years. Prior research indicated that teachers were successful with the students when they enjoyed extensive support from the project developers. What would happen when the project support was no longer available? Would their students be as…

Some issues in the design of classroom research on second language teaching are discussed, with the intention of helping the researcher avoid conceptual pitfalls that may cripple the study later in the process. This begins with an examination of concerns in sampling, including definition of a population to be studied, alternative sampling…

Chapters in this report outline the potential plans for the redesign of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It is argued that any successful redesign must consider the NAEP as a whole. This report reviews overall NAEP designs and discusses the implications that each of the designs has for various functional areas. The following…

The "CSE Program Evaluation Kit" is a series of nine books intended to assist people conducting program evaluations. This volume, the third in the kit, discusses the logic underlying the use of quantitative research designs, including the pretest-posttest design, and supplies step-by-step procedures for setting up and interpreting the…

This report summarizes tasks undertaken to assess the feasibility of a longitudinal analysis of elementary and secondary schools. The initial objective was to see if it was technically possible to analyze overlap samples of schools from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) to produce substantive findings. Over the course of the project various…

Written for students on the threshold or in the early stages of a postgraduate degree, this book introduces the key tools and terminology of research, explains what to do before beginning a postgraduate research project, and suggests ways to arrive at a research question or hypothesis. The discussion also covers the student-supervisor relationship…

The U.S. Department of Education provides a great deal of support to education each year through formula funding (e.g., Title I, Title III services to students) and discretionary grants (e.g., Title III pro-fessional development grants, Safe Schools/Healthy Students projects). However, because evaluations of these projects, and many educational…

Educational research has changed in the last ten years from "a field that was dominated by measurement, operationalized definitions, variables, hypothesis testing, and statistics" to a research mode that emphasizes "description, induction, grounded theory, and the study of people's understanding. We refer to this approach as…

157 Science teachers from 39 schools in Scotland completed a 44-item questionnaire on their perceptions of effective science teaching. (Editor)

Presents a social systems framework for mass communications research and traces the evolution of the model. (TO)

The purpose of the present research was to investigate whether people in fact encode general terms on the basis of the properties of particular instances. (Author)

An interdisciplinary, in-depth study involving 40 children and nine families was conducted among Canadian Indians in order to learn their attitudes toward education. (Author/RK)