This report is the product of a conference designed to define profitable areas of inquiry in the sociology of education with emphasis on the intersection of sociological inquiry and urgent problems in educational research. It is compiled from the stenotyped record of conference proceedings (five sessions at which position reports were presented as…

A "Research Conference on the Use of Autobiographical Data as Psychological Predictors" brought together 15 research psychologists to discuss means of maximizing the use of autobiographical instruments. The purposes of the conference were to: (1) reveal experiences, statistical data, and psychological insights developed through research and the…

This document contains summaries of six courses presented at the Second Annual Presessions of the American Educational Research Association: (1) Bayesian statistical analysis, (2) curriculum research and evaluation, (3) design and analysis of comparative experiments in education, (4) educational research management procedures, (5) multivariate…

The study assessed young adults' attitudes toward childlessness and identified certain factors which predict positive or negative attitudes toward childlessness. The author anticipated finding changes in attitudes because of recent social developments such as awareness of world overpopulation, availability of birth control methods, pressure for…

The author contends that the secondary analyst may have a different perspective and theoretical persuasion than the original investigator, may have the advantage of more current theory and practices than those originally available, may move beyond the substantive and methodological limitations of the original investigation, and may not be faced by…

Methods of defining and projecting a concept of consumer unit appropriate for analyses of changes in the tax-transfer system are presented. The population of persons covered by the March supplements to the Current Population Surveys is organized into simulated tax and transfer system (STATS) units and results are shown for several years. The…

The impact of the tax-transfer system on the distribution of income among economic units is the subject of a number of studies by the Office of Research and Statistics of the Social Security Administration. One of the most important data sources for the work is the Census Bureau's March Current Population Survey (CPS). To conduct such studies, the…

A brief historical account of developments in early childhood education in New Zealand is presented as background for a discussion of current research in this area. Five main sources of research in New Zealand, each with a special research style and field of interest are cited: (1) the universities, (2) the Department of Education, (3) women's…

Standardized reading tests exert a great influence on curriculum materials, teaching methods, and student perceptions of the nature of reading; these tests must reflect the best recent research findings. Passage dependency research has attempted to increase the accuracy of reading tests, and has focused on the following four areas: (1) reading…

The interview process provides students with a contextual framework for writing essays (reports, profiles, and arguments), because it helps them to identify and develop their own conceptual and investigative skills through dialogue with another person. Before the actual interview, it is important to choose a subject to interview, form a sense of…

A strategy is proposed for dealing with educational research problems, using as an example a study based on data that had already been collected and using that data to discover how differences in school characteristics may result in differences in their students. The research method is based on concepts of analysis of covariance and is concerned…

This is one of several study guides on contemporary problems produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science with support of the National Science Foundation. This document is a state of the art report on "social impact assessment." Four components of this process are examined: (1) the problem of social impact…

This study reports on an ethnographic investigation of a desegregated high school in Memphis, Tennessee. Processes of interracial education that occur in a desegregated school are examined in a discussion of some principles of educational stratification. The interaction of stratification and schooling in the United States is explained. The…

Described are three experiments which probed children's sensitivity to structure or organization in visual patterns. Each experiment employed a different paradigm (complexity judgment, discrimination learning, recognition learning, and memory) in order to tap different aspects of children's use of structural information. Subjects were children in…

Two basic concerns of this study were to discover if cognitive level affects a child's understandings about family and to explore the effects of social learning factors on a child's understandings of family. Subjects were 28 boys and girls at each of the three higher Piagetian cognitive levels who were each given a newly constructed interview…