Educational practitioners tend to resist or avoid doing educational research primarily for two reasons: their prior experience with statistics, computers, and research design has produced insecurity and anxiety; and, they have acquired a basic misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of research. Good research should be both technically sound…

Theories about, methods of studying, and definitions of family have undergone profound shifts over the last several decades, and change continues to characterize developmental research on family functioning. In the 1990s, researchers have recognized the need for more descriptive studies as well as more process-oriented work. Research is beginning…

Power refers to the probability that a statistical test will yield statistically significant results. In spite of the close relationship between power and statistical significance, there is a consistent overemphasis in the literature on statistical significance. This paper discusses statistical significance and its limitations and also includes a…

The nine-volume Survey Kit is designed to help readers prepare and conduct surveys and become better users of survey results. All the books in the series contain instructional objectives, exercises and answers, examples of surveys in use, illustrations of survey questions, guidelines for action, checklists of "dos and don'ts," and…

This paper discusses research on activity structure design in a project-based science classroom and efforts to adapt designs from this setting to an after-school program involving historical inquiry. Common activity structures such as classroom lessons and Initiation-Reply-Evaluation (I-R-E) sequences are important cultural tools that help…

A conference was convened to bring together representatives of educational research planning efforts underway in federal agencies and professional and scientific organizations. This report identifies the principal emphases and tentative agreements from the sessions. The clear sense of the conference was that the educational research system has…

This paper presents an overview of a 3-year longitudinal study conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The purpose of the study is to examine the concurrent, long-term, and cumulative influences of variations in early child care experiences on the cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical…

This manual provides documentation and guidance for users of the public release data files (adult file and course file) for Adult Education (AE) component of the 1991 National Household Education Survey (NHES:91). The NHES:91 was a random-digit dial telephone survey developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and conducted by…

Building on an earlier study, this paper presents the findings of a series of studies that asked senior newspaper editors throughout the United States how they view newspaper coverage of issues of concern to gays and lesbians. The paper presents detailed findings reported in four earlier papers analyzing data from the survey: "Daily Newspaper…

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) was conducted for the first time in 1991 as a way to collect data on the early childhood education experiences of young children and participation in adult education. Because the NHES methodology is relatively new, field tests were necessary. A large field test of approximately 15,000 households was…

This document presents the arts education research agenda that emerged from a national conference on arts education. The conference was attended by key researchers in each of the arts education disciplines, arts educators, artists and artist teachers, representatives of arts institutions and organizations, and persons from groups and organizations…

The purpose of this study is to help define the precise nature and limits of the tolerable range in which a researcher may be relatively confident about the statistical validity of his or her research findings, focusing specifically on the statistical validity of results when violating the assumptions associated with the one-way, fixed-effects…

A discussion of issues concerning the feasibility of conducting a Spanish version of the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) is presented. The discussion is based on a 1992 seminar to address linguistic, political, and logistic concerns in such an undertaking. While the experience with the NALS guided discussion, the primary focus was on special…

A study used the Reading Retelling Profile to examine the effectiveness of the holistic instructional approach called "reading workshop," which involves increased time for sustained silent reading, authentic literature in the reading program, a choice of books to read, written response journals, group discussions, and a supportive…

This paper addresses one area of conflict in decisionmaking in computer-based instruction (CBI) research: the relationship between the researcher's definition of CBI either as a medium or as an integrated system and the design of meaningful research questions. (A medium is defined here as a device for the delivery of instruction, while an…