A series of studies is in progress to investigate special educators' perspectives of practices in the education of students with learning disabilities. This paper reports on the first phase which focused on construction and distribution of a survey instrument ("Selecting Specific Practices") and analyzing the results. Four dimensions of practicing…

Network Science projects are endeavors in which a number of classrooms conduct the same scientific experiment and pool their data using World Wide Web technology. This paper reviews selected findings from research on these projects and describes the recent Web applications that were developed in response to these findings. Findings indicated that…

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is a data collection system of the National Center for Education Statistics, which has as its mission the collection and publication of data on the condition of education in the United States. The NHES is specifically designed to provide information on educational issues that are best addressed by…

Those who study education policy have struggled to understand how money matters in education and why educational research finds no strong or consistent relationship between expenditures and student performance. The papers in this publication were commissioned by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to address the twin concerns of…

The Prince George's County (Maryland) school system has developed a database warehouse system as an evaluation data support tool for fulfilling the system's information demands. This paper described the Research and Evaluation Assimilation Database (READ) warehouse support system and considers the requirements for data used in evaluation and how…

This publication describes an evaluation design developed to assess school-to-work (STW) efforts throughout the Saginaw Valley STW Partnership area in Michigan. An introduction is followed by an overview of the aim of evaluation. Section 3 describes how the variables pertinent to the evaluation of the STW program initiative were identified,…

A pilot study to investigate the use of concept mapping for assessment purposes was conducted during the spring of 1996. Thirteen teachers from a random sample of science teachers affiliated with the Iowa-Scope, Sequence, and Coordination Project and 12 other teachers affiliated with the project participated in the concept mapping study. Student…

A state educational indicator system being developed by the Pennsylvania Educational Policy Studies (PEPS) project at the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) is described. The extensive database that has been established as part of the PEPS project includes thousands of variables that are descriptive of the 500 Pennsylvania school districts.…

The Comparative Database System (CDS) provides a means for coding and using data on U.S. and international postsecondary educational activity and behavior. CDS permits education-data users to obtain accurate and reliable comparative data on postsecondary education questions. This document contains a discussion of the development of CDS, a detailed…

In a relatively small, predominantly undergraduate university, it is often hard to find the time and resources to conduct educational research. One small liberal arts college, the University of Montevallo (Alabama), has addressed this problem by involving undergraduate psychology majors in collaboration in educational research with faculty. It is…

This report sought to test the hypothesis that living on campus fosters cognitive growth by estimating the relative freshman-year gains in reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning, and critical thinking of resident and commuter students at an urban university. Data were collected from 210 college freshmen students at a large research…

This paper evaluates the effects of using the NUDIST (Non-numerical, Unstructured Data Indexing, Searching and Theorising) computer program to organize coded, qualitative data. The use of the software is discussed within the context of the study for which it was used: an Australian study that aimed to develop a theoretical understanding of the…

This report reviews the current characteristics of faculty in higher education institutions compared to those of faculty members 20 years ago. It is based on fall 1995 data and 1976 comparison data. A major finding is a substantial increase (91 percent) in the number of part-time faculty compared with an increase of 27 percent in the number of…

This document examines the principles, use, and benefits of human resource accounting (HRA), which uses numerical and nonnumerical data on items such as costs and benefits of training, staff turnover, absenteeism, and the value of employees' knowledge to measure the value of human resources in enterprises. The introduction presents an overview of…

This book is designed to provide knowledge about educational research and to help graduate students in education organize and conduct their own research. No prior familiarity with the principles, procedures, or terminology of educational research is required. Chapters are: (1) "Educational Research: Its Nature and Rules of Operation"; (2) "Types…