All social science serves some agenda: social science research is a value-bound, value-determined, context-situated, and ideologically loaded enterprise. Each researcher makes choices in the following areas, whether tacitly, implicitly, or deliberately: (1) a paradigm choice, either conventional (rationalistic) or emerging (naturalistic); (2) the…

This paper summarizes the Alabama Career Incentive Program, a statewide effort to evaluate more than 30,000 teachers including specialists in guidance, speech therapy, and so on. The evaluation was based on 10 classroom competencies and five outside-the-class professional competencies. A low-inference instrument measured competencies by using…

The paper, originally given at a 1986 Ethnic and Multicultural Symposium, emphasizes the need for schools to recognize and understand the impact of culture on student academic and social success. Classroom based assessment and evaluation strategies for use with culturally diverse, behaviorally disordered students are reviewed and discussed. An…

The purpose of this study was to develop a preliminary understanding of the nature of provider-parent relationships in family day care homes, as revealed through interviews with providers and parents and observations of their interactions in a small number of day care homes. The study relied primarily on the theoretical and methodological…

A formally conducted field study was used to investigate the work of vice-principals of eight large Southern California high schools and the relationship of their work to the school as an organization. Most of the vice-principals studied deal with student discipline, but four have important discipline responsibilities, which they exercise by…

The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate a microcounseling technique, microtechnology, with regard to its effects on three measures of cooperation in young children. A 3x3x2 factorial analysis of covariance was carried out on two of the three measures, with three grade levels, three levels of teacher involvement with microtechnology, and…

Two methodologies for teacher-focused process evaluation--rating scales and systematic observation--are discussed and comments are made about their characteristics and effective utilization to improve teachers' performance. Process evaluation, referring specifically to the act of evaluating what teachers do in their classrooms, may be of formative…

Teacher attitudes (inputs) and classroom practices (processes) were used to predict residual student achievement scores (outputs). A combination of three approaches were used to control for student background characteristics and isolate the effects of school variables: (1) a "residual" measure of achievement; (2) an…

Program planning and implementation surveys were completed by 128 teachers of learning disabled students in 42 states. Seven research questions relating to the relationship between teacher or student characteristics and decision behavior were addressed through chi-square analyses or one-way analyses of variance. It was found that the types of…

Under normal instructional circumstances, some youngsters learn programming in BASIC or LOGO better than others. Clinical investigations of novice programmers suggest that this happens in part because different students bring different patterns of learning to the programming context. Many students disengage from the task whenever trouble occurs,…

The thesis of this paper is that systematic research approaches must be developed if the study of play is to avoid a short-lived "in" period before another 30-year hiatus, such as the one that occurred between 1940 and 1970. This paper reviews the present status of research on play, drawing examples from studies of the past 10 years that…

The Collaboration for the Improvement of Teacher Education (CITE) project brought teachers and administrators from four public school districts together with Eastern Michigan University professors to design and implement a research-based pre-student teaching program. The major goal of the program was to develop reflective pedagogical thinking in…

This guide is designed to present a variety of techniques that can be used in conducting classroom observations. Observation techniques are clustered under four major teaching/learning variables: time on task, teacher talk, classroom interaction, and organization and management. Techniques are presented with an overview that details the rationale…

This module, developed by the Research Applications for Teaching (RAFT) project, was written to introduce the preservice teacher to the research base for effective teaching. Particular attention was given to the characteristics of teachers and teaching found in research literature to be associated with achievement and the development of positive…

The development of critical ethnography in education is traced, and the central epistemological and methodological issues in the practice of critical ethnography are discussed. Some of the directions the field appears to be taking are considered. Critical ethnography in education began in the late 1960's and early 1970's, with roots in the…