This article analyses the implementation of market-type mechanisms in the management of universities. The question of which cultural biases have been used in the implementation of New Public Management (NPM) in Norwegian universities is discussed. Cultural theory, institutional theory, and public policy studies are applied to the analysis of a…

A reply to Lawrence Ferrara's Chapter 4 in R. Phelps, R. Sadoff, E. Warburton, and L. Ferrara, "A Guide to Research in Music Education," 5th Edition is presented. It it curious that Ferrara disagrees with Jack Heller and Edward J. P. O'Connor's view that "philosophy" is not "research," yet in the chapter headings in the book A Guide to Research in…

Realistic client expectations about career counseling are essential to positive client outcomes. The authors investigated a videotaped intervention designed to influence participants' expectations about career counseling using a pretest/posttest experimental design. As measured by the Expectations About Counseling-Brief Form (H. E. A. Tinsley,…

In education research, a polar distinction is frequently made to describe and produce different kinds of research: "quantitative" versus "qualitative." In this article, the authors argue against that polarization and the associated polarization of the "subjective" and the "objective," and they question the attribution of generalizability to only…

Many studies over the last 20--25 years have examined the benefits of mentoring for the protege and the organization. A review of these studies being published revealed that there is not only a lack of studies utilizing or reporting comparison group information but also a general lack of experimental research about mentoring. This quantitative…

Not all policy questions can be addressed by social experiments. Nonexperimental evaluation methods provide an alternative to experimental designs but their results depend on untestable assumptions. This paper presents evidence on the reliability of propensity score matching (PSM), which estimates treatment effects under the assumption of…

Are traditional laboratories in the core introductory biology courses teaching physiology majors the art and trade of science, or simply leaving them with a memory of trivial experiments done for unknown reasons? Our students, a population dominated by premed and physiology majors, think the latter and have encouraged us to challenge this model,…

There has been growing interest and increasing use of case study (CS) materials in teacher education. Yet efforts to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of CS have been scarce. We compared instructional effectiveness of CS to another commonly used discussion strategy, an application question (AQ) method, with graduate students enrolled in a…

Associations between self-esteem and abuse of alcohol and psychoactive substances have been documented in empirical studies involving high school and college students. No research exists that addresses whether this association generalizes to adult homeless substance users. The current study uses secondary data analysis methodology to evaluate an…

This article provides a response to the National Research Council's report, "Scientific Research in Education." While it concedes the report provides recommendations useful for improving research with students with low incidence disabilities, it argues the preference for random-assignment experiments may leave out research on students…

Purpose: This article presents, and explains the issues behind, the Stuttering Treatment Research Evaluation and Assessment Tool (STREAT), an instrument created to assist clinicians, researchers, students, and other readers in the process of critically appraising reports of stuttering treatment research. Method: The STREAT was developed by…

In this paper, the efficiency of conditional maximum likelihood (CML) and marginal maximum likelihood (MML) estimation of the item parameters of the Rasch model in incomplete designs is investigated. The use of the concept of F-information (Eggen, 2000) is generalized to incomplete testing designs. The scaled determinant of the F-information…

Ecophilosophers suggest that the achievement of environmental sustainability requires a transformation in worldview, from a modern to an ecological worldview. This suggestion poses a very interesting challenge for researchers in environmental disciplines. What would research look like that is grounded in an ecological worldview? What would it mean…

This paper describes a family literacy project that involved parents whose children were attending a pre-school centre in a low socio-economic suburb of Perth, Western Australia. A formative experimental design was used to examine the home literacy practices of the families as described by the parents, and to construct a series of workshops. The…

This paper situates paradigm talk with its insistence on multiplicities and proliferations in tension with a resurgent positivism and governmental imposition of experimental design as the gold standard in research methods. Using the concept of "coloring epistemologies" as an index of such tensions, the essay argues for proliferation as an…