This doctoral dissertation reports on a study that examined the perceptions of the relative use by academic deans of six primary administrative control mechanisms. The effects of four known determinants of organizational control use were gathered from a sample composed of both faculty and administration from four public postsecondary institutions.…

This study demonstrated the use of self-recorded audiotape to collect data on students' perceptions, attitudes, and use of learning activities in written teaching texts. The process of asking students to respond to questions within the teaching text was straightforward and presented few problems in subsequent analysis. On several indicators…

This report reviews the work which has been carried out under the label of "research in student learning," in order to examine the significance of the findings for distance education, and to discuss some of the methodological issues raised in carrying out this research. The discussion also provides insights into conducting this type of research in…

This study incorporated classroom observations and taped interviews designed to reveal what each teacher believed about such matters as the nature of science and knowledge, the nature and purpose of education in general and science education in particular, and basic beliefs regarding God and purpose in life. Classroom practices of the…

The purpose of this study was to determine what representations of content existed in a secondary environmental science class and what happended to those representations during curriculum occasions. Initial data construction involved attention to what was actually going on during class sessions. Following this, a reanalysis of the data corpus with…

This survey of the instruments and methods that are currently available for assessing mental health problems in persons with mental retardation lists formalized instruments and interview techniques and evaluates them from a methodological perspective. Emphasis is on the assessment and classification of disorders rather than on the evaluation of…

Effects of answer changing on tests by 133 fifth- and sixth-grade students were investigated to determine the degree to which these students changed answers, the extent to which they gained from changing, and the reasons they advanced for the changes. Students were from a predominantly suburban district (n=88) and a predominantly rural district…

A study was performed to evaluate the effects of tutor initiated telephone communication on students' course completion rates and their quantitative achievements in the Norwegian NKI distance education program. Secondary goals of the project were to assess other consequences of teletutoring, such as organization, costs, and student and tutor…

In 1984, a new corpus of spoken Quebecois French (Canada) was added to the existing data. In developing it, half of the native speakers participating in a 1971 study were re-interviewed, providing previously unavailable data on individual language development. The report describes in detail the sociolinguistic methodology used in developing the…

This document is a protocol for interviewing new faculty to be used in conjunction with a new faculty survey as part of a project to create a profile of new faculty at U.S. colleges and universities. An introduction reports that the survey had been distributed to 5 schools (2 liberal arts colleges, a community college, a comprehensive univesity,…

This paper examines points in oral test interviews where an interviewee explicitly seeks clarification from the interviewer on the content of a question posed, prior to attempting to answer a question. Some of the interviews are drawn from the Finnish Foreign Language Diploma for Professional Purposes examination (Tyoelaman kielidiplomi); others…

A study was done of the views of senior research managers in industry on the roles of business and universities in innovation, techical change, and competitiveness. This effort stemmed from an earlier set of roundtable discussions on university-industry research alliances and sought to add a stronger component of industrial views to an ongoing…

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of the leadership of nine presidents who have accepted the risks and challenges of executive leadership in nine small Midwestern colleges. Focus is directed toward these presidents' risk-taking strategies with respect to the major leadership challenges of being a senior executive of a small…

This ERIC/RCS Special Collection contains 10 or more Digests (brief syntheses of the research on a specific topic in contemporary education) and FAST Bibs (Focused Access to Selected Topics--annotated bibliographies with selected entries from the ERIC database), providing up-to-date information in an accessible format. The collection focuses on…

Interviews with university and college department chairs or persons responsible for existing educational administration and higher education programs evaluated the effects of a merged structure (combining the two programs) on the study of administration. Sixteen universities were visited and program heads were interviewed. Identified advantages of…