Abstracts of most of the papers presented at the 58th annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) have been collected in this publication. These papers related to such areas as: science curriculum development, design, and implementation; science test development; factors influencing student science…

Many times in both educational and social science research it is impossible to collect data that is complete. When administering a survey, for example, people may answer some questions and not others. This missing data causes a problem for researchers using structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques for data analyses. Because SEM and…

The study describes the use, popularity, and effectiveness of selected social studies curriculum project materials (CPMs). Five multistate surveys identified 11 CPMs which were judged to be widely used and therefore served as the basis for the study. These included materials from the High School Geography Project, Anthropology Curriculum Study…

This manual contains information for conducting regular student surveys at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. Questionnaires, designed for new, returning, and former student populations, are presented together with the methods by which the instruments should be administered. Guidelines for data analysis and report writing are also outlined. The…

This document describes research which examined the principles of reward and punishment applied to certain types of behavior portrayed by characters illustrated in 30 school readers. It was hypothesized that certain portrayed values, which have political connotations, are being transmitted to young people through the indirect method of…

Student withdrawal from the University of Iowa was studied using an exit survey. Students' reasons for leaving the university, their future plans, and possible interventions that would have assisted the student to remain in school were assessed, along with the validity of the survey. Although there was only 62 percent agreement between the exit…

This volume, the first in a series of seven reporting the design, methodology and findings of the 4-year National Day Care Home Study (NDCHS), the first national study of family day care, provides a synopsis of the study's findings. Volume One consists of 10 chapters. Chapter I provides background information and an overview of the NDCHS. Design…

This volume, second in a series of seven reporting the design, methodology, and findings of the 4-year National Day Care Home Study (NDCHS), provides a detailed description of the analysis conducted on data gathered through in-depth interviews with the 793 caregivers who participated in the NDCHS. Chapter I, the introduction, discusses the social…

Two surveys were conducted to further increase understanding of two-career families and the corporations that employ them. First, questionnaires sent to Fortune 1300 corporations probed for awareness on the part of corporations of the problems of two-career couples and attempted to elicit evidence of new policy planning. A total of 374 companies…

This report provides for Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) prime sponsors who are responsible for labor market information, a set of guidelines to follow for developing an agency-wide plan for the operational use of labor market information. The body of the report outlines step-by-step procedures for creating such a plan. A brief…

A long-term project entitled Agricultural Manpower Needs in North Dakota examined current and projected agriculture manpower needs in the state. Objectives of the project were to develop a methodology for obtaining and interpreting agricultural manpower needs data for North Dakota, to determine emerging employment trends and identify emerging…

Fifty-eight studies relating to the "knowledge gap" hypothesis (a theory that correlates public knowledge to educational level and mass media exposure) are examined in this report. In the opening sections, the theory is defined, and the early information diffusion studies and public opinion polls that led to its formulation in 1970 are…

This paper presents an analysis of research on women in educational administration, identifying the issues which have been treated, examining the methodological perspectives of the research, determining the quality of the research, and formulating a paradigm for future research on women in education. One hundred fourteen doctoral dissertations on…

Arguing that educational testing has not grown with the theory and knowledge base of the reading field, this paper cites the current configuration of testing as a major contributor to the instructional stagnation, methodological back-to-basics movement, and general lack of excitement and true innovation found in classrooms and schools today. The…

A detailed description is provided of the variable individualization of instructional decisions (IDM), which is part of the analysis in phase I of the Evaluation of Practices in Individualized Schooling. The variable is defined; the questionnaires on which the variable is based are listed; the procedures used to scale the variable are explained;…