Addresses the process of interpretation from a study of the academic achievements of Native American high school students in New Mexico, illuminating the relationship of researcher subjectivity to the many decision points that each process of interpretation embodies. The article also contains a counterpoint of problematics that reveals where…

Describes research methods used and problems encountered in fieldwork with rural English youth. Discusses the researcher's positionality and self, making local connections and finding "gatekeepers," building trust with young people, issues of youth safety versus confidentiality, types of communication and parental consent, the…

Describes how one school improved after a new principal put data-based decision making (via a detailed needs assessment) at the heart of school reform and staff development efforts, discussing the school's evolution. The paper examines key factors that support the effective use of data in schools: focus to answer questions, reflection to provide…

Applied qualitative methods to assess students' interest in science to responses of 2,118 German students in grades 5 through 7 to items measuring interest. Each method (additive cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, and latent class analysis) is considered qualitative because it supports a focus on the structure of interest. Each approach…

Describes the use of focus groups with teacher candidates to evaluate a pilot program within the Queen's University Faculty of Education. The pilot study was designed to uncover problems in implementing the program before candidates registered. After reviewing focus-group techniques, the article describes how they were used in the pilot study's…

Asserts that reviews like that of M. Wang, G. Haertel, and H. Walberg are stimulating and useful in thinking about educational research, but they are nearly useless in thinking about educational policy and practice. It is not clear what is meant by "knowledge base," and the finding about proximal and distal variables is simplistic. (SLD)

This article investigates parents' status within educational research and examines some research paradigms that have been used. A number of inherent methodological and ethical issues are identified and several fundamental aspects are explored. It is argued that researchers should adopt a partnership model for cooperative research on parental…

Describes meta-analysis, a quantitative approach to conducting literature reviews. Illustrates the power of this technique by reporting the quantitative effects of cooperative learning on chemistry achievement in high school and college classes. (Contains 32 references.) (WRM)

Describes a community-based research project that collaborated with the police department to survey female residents' attitudes toward the role of the police in handling domestic violence cases. Explains that this project provided students with the opportunity to directly experience the research process early in their undergraduate psychology…

Describes person-based follow-back design and narrative analyses to examine young adult developmental adaptation despite serious prior risks and adversity. Describes identification of competent young adults and narrative analysis method. Presents preliminary findings detailing content and structural themes involving individual constructions of…

Argues for a holistic core that balances the dialectic tensions between social science and humanities, scholarly discipline and craft/praxis, and common and special topics within the discipline. Offers rationales for two other unique features of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington curriculum: research methods at the front end of the…

Discusses methodological issues in empirical studies of information-related behavior in six specific research areas: information needs and uses; information seeking; relevance judgment; online searching (including online public access catalog, online database, and the Web); human-system interactions; and reference transactions. (Contains 191…

Twenty-four meta-analyses in mental retardation, learning disabilities, and emotional/behavior disorders were reviewed and analyzed across six domains of information necessary for securing face validity of published meta-analyses. Wide variations that could influence summative results were found. Additionally, temporal analysis of 44 meta-analyses…

This study investigates information-seeking behavior of one particular segment of international students--international students seeking degrees in the field of business. The author surveyed domestic and international business students enrolled in the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The survey was designed to…

At least since John Dewey published his classic works (Dewey [1916] 1938; 1933; [1938] 1963), teachers have been urged to engage students by using thinking and inquiry tasks that reflect real-world concerns and interests. Subsequent to the appearance of Dewey's discussions of that pedagogical stance, the National Council for the Social Studies…