Despite its longevity as an educational activity, little empirical evidence exists to support the notion that academic debate is of value to participants. Numerous contemporary texts have proposed and advanced the claim that debating enhances the critical thinking skills of participants. Several of these texts find this claim so apparent that it…

This repeated measures factorial design study compared the results of two procedures for identifying multivariate outliers under varying conditions, the Mahalanobis distance and the Andrews-Pregibon statistic. Results were analyzed for the total number of outliers identified and number of false outliers identified. Simulated data were limited to…

In psychological and special education research, group comparison experimental designs are more often used than single subject experimental designs. However, the application of group designs poses many difficulties, such as the collection of large numbers of homogeneous subjects for a particular experimental condition, the averaging of individual…

Although a large body of research has investigated the possibility of motivational or attitudinal differences in men and women that would explain observable differences in levels of achievement, much of this research has failed to produce results. The failure of researchers to consider the characteristics of their college-student samples may have…

The value of physical or corporal punishment is disputed among psychologists; most regard it as harmless, although a subgroup of researchers has controversially suggested that parental use of physical punishment may be causally related to the development of aggression. Thus, the psychological community appears to have separated into determined…

This literature review examines research issues in anorexia nervosa, including conceptual issues and methodological considerations. Research on the family's contribution to the disorder is reviewed. The demographic characteristics of social class, birth order, history of sexual abuse, and biological and genetic factors are examined. Individual…

The paper examines the goals and effects of early intervention with infants at risk for possible developmental problems. Four components of San Francisco Infant Program are noted: (1) services to children, (2) parent involvement, (3) a transdisciplinary team approach, and (4) a research-based model. The research problems associated with…

Three computer simulations were conducted to show that very high aggregate predictive validity coefficients can occur when the across-case variability in absolute score stability occurring in both the predictor and criterion matrices is quite small. In light of the increase in internal consistency reliability achieved by the method of aggregation…

Although it is widely known that special assumptions are needed for univariate analysis of repeated measures data, researchers seldom examine their data for violation of these assumptions. This paper reviews ways in which repeated measures analyses are usually handled and describes limitations of these methods. A design with two within subject…

Principles of program evaluation research are outlined so that bilingual education program coordinators can conduct methodologically acceptable program evaluations. The three basic principles of evaluation research are: identification of the program participants, definition of the program intervention, and assessment of program effectiveness.…

Surveys current methodologies and problems in enrollment forecasting at the State and institutional level. (Author/MLF)

Of 460 two-year colleges responding to a national survey in 1973-74, 63 percent reported some kind of institutional research, but only 15 percent reported that their colleges routinely based important decisions on the results of this research. The most popular areas of research were students, student services, and institutional operations. Other…

A critical overview is presented of the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Zimbardo and his coinvestigators in which they attempted a structural analysis of the problems of imprisonment. Key assumptions are questioned, primarily on methodological grounds, which casts doubts on the plausibility of the experimenters' final causal inferences.…

Piaget's class-inclusion task was revised class-inclusion tasks were administered to 64 kindergarten and 64 first-graders. Each of the revisions enhanced performance as compared with Piaget's standard procedures. These results are considered in terms of two possible interpretations. (Author/SDH)