Opinion polls are playing an increasingly important role in decision making in higher education. Drawing from the experiences of one university polling organization, this article discusses issues frequently encountered in polling, productive and unproductive resolutions of these issues, and guidelines for conducting high-quality campus polls.…

Criticizes James Coleman's study, "Public and Private Schools," and points out methodological weaknesses in sampling, testing, data reliability, and statistical methods. Questions assumptions which have led to conclusions justifying federal support, especially tuition tax credits, to private schools. Raises the issue of ethical standards…

Discusses research design errors including: (1) poor control over extraneous natural covariates of family type, particularly socioeconomic status; (2) unrepresentative samples; and (3) invalid dependent measures. Reports on conceptual blind spots, which include equation of conventional with healthy behavior and failure to anticipate either…

Reviewed research on the effect of the presence of other people on individuals' willingness to help in an emergency. Attention was paid to the nature of the precipitating incident; ambiguity of the helping situation; laboratory versus field settings; characteristics of subjects, victims, and bystanders; and communication among bystanders.…

Extensive data on twins, nontwin siblings, siblings separated by adoption, and parent-child similarity indicate that the heritability of intelligence is closer to .50 than to .70. Differences could be due to environmental or genetic changes in the population, or to methodology. (Author/CP)

Presents criteria used to identify the nation's best evaluated exemplary career education activities and provides a list of the seven programs reviewed by the Joint Dissemination Review Panel and judged to be exemplary. (MF)

Describes a student field project which measured and interpreted ground-level aspects of the urban heat island in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. Discusses procedural steps and decisions, field procedures, data compiling, findings, evaluation, and dissemination of results. (Author/CK)

Describes field techniques related to inventory of neighborhood housing quality which can be used in undergraduate geography courses to help students increase their awareness of microscale variations in the urban/suburban landscape. Housing conditions in inner-city Sacramento are used as a case study. (Author/DB)

This first of three articles in a symposium on the research effort of the International Association of the Evaluation of Educational Achievement is an historical portrait of the IEA studies providing insights concerning the methodological and political aspects of a large-scale, multinational research project. (Editor/SJL)

Explains and demonstrates time-series statistical analyses with a case example. Argues graphs and nonparometrical statistical analyses are not valid methods for evaluating behavior change due to counseling. Suggests the use of time-series statistical analyses enables counselors to employ a reliable method of measuring change in counseling…

Investigates the myth of the inner-city elderly as isolated. Suggests: there are severe limitations to traditional measures of determining sociability; social network analysis can overcome many of the deficiencies of other methods; and a synthesis of the anthropological and sociological approaches to network analysis can optimize data collection.…

Describes and discusses the rule-assessment approach, a new research strategy for studying developmental sequences in children's acquisition of knowledge. Four experiments were conducted to illustrate the utility of this approach across a variety of concepts and a wide range of ages (three-year-olds to college students). (Author/CM)

Reasons for and methods of using the WESTLAW orientation program for computer-assisted legal research training are presented. A primer is provided to acquaint the student with the research and information retrieval system, especially in formulating search strategies. Available from Am. Assoc. Law Libraries, 53 W. Jackson Blvd., Suite 1201,…

Illustrates simple, inexpensive procedures for involving readers in decisions about which comics and light features to include in a newspaper. (RL)

This study focused on identifying what methods or activities might be most influential in the acceptance and use of educational innovations. Specific emphasis was placed on variables associated with the adoption-proneness of trade and industrial teachers. Results suggest that adoption-prone groups should assume leadership in the use of…