The legitimacy of using the criterion of low reading achievement in the study of learning and memory skills with learning disabled children was assessed, based on a comparison of 35 nondisabled students, 15 low readers, and 10 learning disabled high school students. Learning disabilities were defined as encompassing perceptual and/or processing…

Suicide is one of the least understood of human behaviors, especially the causes and factors associated with suicide in young children. To replicate and clarify an earlier study, which used a methodology for determining suicidal ideation in different groups of people by examining the thoughts and ideas they projected onto another, 2,386 subjects…

Human factors engineering can be defined as the application of scientific principles, methods, and data drawn from a variety of disciplines to the development of engineering systems in which people play a significant role. Since human factors issues arise in every domain in which humans interact with the products of a technological society, six…

A cafeteria-style approach for evaluating primary grade programs in a large metropolitan school district is described. This evaluation approach involved planning between one and four evaluation options for each of 17 program options available to the district's 70 elementary schools. About 20,000 kindergarten through grade 3 students were enrolled…

This paper reports on a study developed to determine what experts in the area of educational research perceive as the basic skills and knowledge areas that one who has successfully completed a one-semester graduate course in educational research should possess. A decision was made to conduct a Delphi study to identify these skills and knowledge…

As a step in combining three of the Elementary and Secondary Education surveys of the National Center for Education Statistics to produce one database linking local education agencies, schools, and teachers, the merged procedures and collections forms were pretested. Different methods were tested by splitting the pretest sample of 220 public…

A comparative analysis was made in the Netherlands of three projects aimed at answering the following research questions: (1) what are the backgrounds and characteristics of the methods for the construction of qualification profiles (a description of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for job performance) for the curriculum and training…

A study of Arizona vocational education follow-up systems was designed to survey problems in and promising practices for developing information systems to provide useful data for decision making. Interviews with state, county, college, and school district personnel revealed that the major problem faced by those conducting follow-up studies at both…

Thirty-three active doctoral advisors on the faculty of a research oriented university participated in a study of the way faculty advisors prepare their doctoral candidates for the literature review portion of the dissertation. It is noted that common student opinions are: their own library use skills are inadequate; this inadequacy is shameful;…

Approaches to studying enrollment decline are compared and limitations and advantages associated with each method in predicting response to decline are assessed. The literature is reviewed to identify research perspectives on decline. Variables consistent with each perspective are identified and measured on a sample of 56 small- to medium-sized…

This study is designed to identify the computer competencies that should be required of library/information studies (LIS) graduates of the Graduate School of Library Studies (GSLS) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The long term objective of the study is to provide information for the policy and planning of GSLS. The study examines how certain…

This paper provides an understanding of the conceptual and operational relationships between evaluation, content analysis, and microcomputers so that evaluation practitioners can better address applied content analysis problems used in their work. The first section presents a general model for conducting an evaluation effort that focuses on…

Articles and essays in this journal issue focus on explaining ethnographic (observation taking into account socioeconomic and cultural factors) research procedures and showing how this methodology can be applied to English classes and reported in ways useful to teachers. The first article, by Paul Diesing, provides background on ethnography. The…

This project is the sixth in a series of studies designed to validate the Training and Development Benefit Forecasting Method (BFM) sponsored by the Training and Development Research Center (TDRC) at the University of Minnesota. The purpose of this study was to validate the BFM's ability to forecast the benefits of an organization development…

Two innovative methods for collecting and analyzing qualitative data are vignettes and pre-structured cases. Vignettes are descriptions of situations or problems written by a professional, with a suggested outline and comments provided by a researcher. Advantages of this method are strength of impact of the written descriptions and efficiency of…