Context: The context for this article is the public response to the federal role in the oversight and enforcement of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This response has been characterized by a tension between concerns about federal interference in public education and support for…

Background: Accountability demands are increasingly pushing school leaders to explore more data and do more sophisticated analyses. Data-driven decision making (DDDM) has become an emerging field of practice for school leadership and a central focus of education policy and practice. Purpose: This study examined principals' DDDM practices and…

The widespread problem of substance abuse negatively affects users and their families. This paper provides a methodological review of empirical studies that focused on systemic interventions (particularly marital and family therapy) in the treatment of substance abuse. The articles examined here focused on engaging the addict in treatment,…

A collaboration to develop materials that will foster critical thinking and communication skills through library-based research is described and presented. Library activities were designed to promote the use of cognitive skills, such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. This was a pilot study designed to expose undergraduate students to one…

This testimony summarizes in four propositions results from a review of recent estimates of the net federal, state, or local costs of immigration and is designed to explore why these cost estimates vary so widely and how to develop more credible cost estimates. First, the testimony proposes that various studies of the cost of immigration agree…

Because public schools do not randomly assign students and teachers across schools (a methodological utopia), multilevel evaluation methods which account for student and school contextual and practice variables in their natural settings provide the most rigorous means for showing empirically what is actually happening in school classrooms.…

Intended for students and for researchers who conduct interviews as part of case studies or as ethnography, this book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the theory and practice of qualitative interviewing. It shows researchers how to design research based on interview data; to stimulate conversation; to absorb what is being said;…

Counseling psychology is a relatively new field that is gaining autonomy and respect. Unfortunately, research efforts in the field may lack an appropriate research design. This paper considers some of the more common types of research design and the associated threats to their validity. An example of each design type is drawn from the counseling…

Based on models created by social reality researchers, a study used a modification of a Solomon four group design to investigate the influence of symbolic reality (exposure to the film "JFK") on a student audience's subjective reality (knowledge of the assassination of President Kennedy, political mistrust and belief in the existence of…

This paper describes collegial model approaches to the interactions between rehabilitation researchers and individuals with disabilities or their family members. The approaches, called participatory research and participatory action research, grew out of a 1989 conference sponsored by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation…

The development of curriculum frameworks for mathematics and science was an essential first step in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The frameworks have served as guides for the design of the achievement testing component of TIMSS, and as the foundation upon which the curriculum analysis component of the study is…

Only a limited number of single-subject studies exist in the literacy field, despite the upsurge of such studies in a wide variety of disciplines. The phrase "single-subject" refers not so much to the number of subjects, but to the way the data are analyzed: each subject's responses are examined individually; they are not averaged with…

A test of statistical significance is a procedure for determining how likely a result is assuming a null hypothesis to be true with randomization and a sample of size n (the given size in the study). Randomization, which refers to random sampling and random assignment, is important because it ensures the independence of observations, but it does…

This volume, the first of three on sponsored research administration, focuses on pre-award activities such as research development, proposal development, budget development, review and submission of proposals, negotiation and award, and compliance issues. Research administration, or sponsored project administration, is work that supports the…

This digest reviews the basic building blocks of a structured interview, points out some of the pitfalls in interviewing, and suggests ways for researchers to avoid these difficulties to produce questions that have the best possibility of generating reliable and accurate data on the topics of interest. The data collection instrument is a document…