Provides a synthesis and a critique of Kulik and Kulik's metasynthesis and Slavin's best-evidence syntheses regarding ability grouping for gifted students. Although both studies address important issues, concerns such as teacher and parent attitudes to grouping and use of gifted students as role models are ignored. Includes 22 references. (MLH)

Three multitrait-multimethod studies are described, which indicated that ill-defined solutions were frequent, and alternative parameterizations tended only to mask this problem. Moreover, method factors sometimes represented trait variance as opposed to method variance. However, specification of method effects as correlated uniqueness proved more…

Field experiences with external (qualitative) evaluation audits based on the work of E. G. Guba and Y. S. Lincoln (1981, 1985) are detailed, including evaluation contexts and purposes, procedures, and findings. Such audits represent a viable meta-evaluative tool for assessing the quality of naturalistic evaluation results. (SLD)

The author compares life-cycle data from a retrospective marital history with those derived for the same individuals from panel information. Results indicate that when a marital event is reported in both sources there is substantial agreement about the date of the event. (CH)

A method of plotting on a large scale map all registered cases of child abuse in an inner London borough is compared to three more complicated methods in its ability to accurately identify target areas. The geographic plotting of cases is favored because of its simplicity and ease of annual updating. (Author/DB)

The methodology for obtaining immanent justice responses was evaluated by means of a replication of Piaget's immanent justice study. Kindergartners and first, third, and fifth graders were presented with four vignettes that allowed for immanent justice responses. Children's responses indicated developmental trends from immature toward mature…

Although the National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference on the Treatment of Panic Disorder endorsed the effectiveness of cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT), D. F. Klein argues that fatal flaws in all but one CBT study undermine claims about the effectiveness of CBT for panic disorder. This article critiques Klein's arguments and…

Decribes the level of mental health problems that are encountered in primary health care and describes the limitation of using randomized control trials. A three-stage model of psychological therapies research is described to show that distinct stages require different methodologies in order to evaluate them. Reviews the literature regarding…

The author illustrates a method for measuring international openness by bringing forward some examples. The index proposed measures the capacity of countries for a given phenomenon, adjusted for their weight in the phenomena concerned. In this study, the Index is applied to measure the degree of openness to international migration in a number of…

The full wavelength coverage of charge coupled device (CCD) detector when coupled with an echelle spectrography, the system allows for simultaneously multiple element spectroscopy to be performed. The multiple-element flame spectrometer was built and characterized through the analysis of environmentally significant elements such as Ca, K, Na, Cu,…

The solvent-free or solid-state reaction systems like the Baeyer-Villiger rearrangement have become popular in the synthetic organic community and viable option for undergraduate laboratory series to reduce waste and cost and simplify reaction process. The reaction is an efficient method to transform ketones to esters and lactones.

Extensive evidence exists demonstrating the benefits of repeated readings (RR) interventions at increasing students' fluency on intervention passages. Few studies however have examined the extent to which repeatedly reading one passage improves students' reading fluency on similar passages. Using an alternating treatment design, we examined the…

In this study, a variation of the bookmark standard setting procedure for passage-based tests is proposed in which separate ordered item booklets are created for the items associated with each passage. This variation is compared to the traditional bookmark procedure for a fifth-grade reading test. The results showed that the single-passage…

Meehl's taxometric method was developed to distinguish categorical and continuous constructs. However, taxometric output can be difficult to interpret because expected results for realistic data conditions and differing procedural implementations have not been derived analytically or studied through rigorous simulations. By applying bootstrap…

This article illustrates how to (a) use schoolwide data to monitor student responsiveness to primary and secondary prevention efforts to identify students for tertiary preventions and (b) design, implement, and evaluate a function-based intervention in collaboration with two general education teachers, who served as the primary interventionists.…