Documents containing empirical research were presented to a group of Educational Research Specialists and to a group of Educational Decision Makers for quality assessment. Decision Makers perceived the reports to be of significantly higher quality than did the Research Specialists. Divergent reasons were given. (Author/RC)

Describes how the average teacher, in assessing the effectiveness of instructional materials, utilizes research methodologies. (Author)

The norms of science define appropriate and inappropriate scholarly or research role performance. The four norms described in this study are (1) universalism: research is assessed on its merit, not particularistic criteria; (2) commonality: research must be made public and shared with the research community; (3) disinterestedness: research is…

Ethnographers find themselves among a family of researchers referred to as naturalists. This rather diverse family conducts research described by turns as qualitative, participant observational, case study, symbolic interactionist, phenomenological, constructivist, and interpretive. The focus of the ethnographer's inquiry is on the mundane,…

Kaplan (1964) describes the now classic distinction between "logic-in-use," the more or less logical cognitive style and procedures used by the educational scientist, and "reconstructed logic," the scientist's after-the-fact, explicit formulation and idealization of the logic and procedures. However, most technical documents…

Members of the Theory into Practice Subcommittee of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) Curriculum Committee were sent an open-ended questionnaire in September 1982. The questionnaire elicited responses from 46 of the 120 subcommittee members. An introduction explains the purpose of the survey as a predecessor for a…

Research on comparative and international education cannot rely solely on the work of scholars. Before conclusions are reached, researchers may benefit from an examination of what journalists working in various countries have learned. While journalists may give less emphasis to education than to political, economic, social, or personality factors,…

Collaborative research maximizes the use of both physical and human resources in education. Benefits to the cooperating institutions (public schools and universities) are improvements in facilities, costs, programs, delivery services, climate, and training. Collaborative research eliminates the separation between the generation of knowledge and…

Frequently, the behavior of researchers reflects important and otherwise unrecognized aspects of the phenomenon which is being studied or evaluated. In other words, the "processes" of the researcher are "parallel" to the "processes" of the entity being studied. These parallel processes are illustrated with examples…

This paper addresses several issues in quantitative research that educational researchers should examine with more care. While the purposes of experimentation is to determine causality, the study of causal relations is difficult and problematic. Computational and conceptual errors in statistical analysis seem limited only by the creativity of the…

This paper proposes an alternative means by which to produce improvement in the quality of professional convention programs. This method is one in which concern for professional relatedness supersedes a concern for individual competition. Dialogue as the first essential element in relatedness would encourage varied perspectives on research…

This paper reviews major stidues in metacognitive research relating to education and discusses their implications for educators and teacher education. Metacognition generally refers to self-awareness, or self knowledge of one's thought processes. Two types of research are discussed: (1) descriptive or correlational data on the natural development…

The focus of this paper is on women with respect to three themes: the reasons why women are attracted to ethnographic research, the problems they may encounter in making this choice, and the prospects for women researchers to influence the future direction of educational research. Four interrelated psychological aspects seem to attract women to…

This commentary makes the case for a re-examination of certain existing guidelines of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) regarding reimbursement of salary costs under NIH grants. The settlement earlier this year involving salary costs and effort reporting at Northwestern University has…

If the findings of educational research are to be more intuitively appealing, readily understood, and widely accepted, educational researchers should give better attention to the reduction of needless methodological complexity and to the improvement of conceptual clarity. (Editor)