Annual Editions: Research Methods 01/02

By Gail Gerlach, Wenfan Yan, Mary Renck Jalongo

A collection of current, carefully selected articles from some of the most respected newspapers, magazines, and journals published today. Within the pages of this new volume are interesting,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 007240437X
• ISBN13: 9780072404371
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.7" x 0.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Very Good Supplement to Course

The "Annual Editions" series from McGraw-Hill/Dushkin now includes seventy volumes covering a wide range of liberal arts subjects . Each volume presents a varied selection of journal articles which are intended to be used as supplemental reading with the course textbook A Web guide is given for each article to facilitate further exploration of each topic. The editors of this particular volume are faculty from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with impressive research credentials in educational research .Moreover, each is an experienced instructor of research methods courses. They have selected "concise, practical articles that could provide insight into the wide range of strategies that researchers can use." The authors state that their book is "... so varied in content and level of difficulty that it could simultaneously meet the demands of different audiences ranging from sophisticated undergraduates to graduate students." The 32 articles found in this volume have been divided into 7 sections: the nature of research, research standards/ethics, theoretical bases of research, research means/methods, categories of research, reporting research, improving research. In the first section [ the nature of research ], Mary M Kennedy discusses "The Connection Between Research and Practice " and the 4 hypotheses of why there is a "perceived lack of connection between research and practice." The fourth hypothesis concerns the simultaneous "Stability (and Instability) of the Education System" in which she comments on American textbooks : The lack of coherent direction is particularly apparent in our textbooks. Both the Second International Mathematics Study [McKnight et al., 1989 ] and the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study [ Schmidt et al., 1996 ] found American textbooks to be more fragmented and superficial than texts in most other countries. They were longer, covered more topics, and devoted more space to review and repetition, so that individual topics were repeated often but were treated with little depth. Similar conclusions have been drawn from examinations of mathematics curricula at other grade levels [ e.g., Porter , 1989 ] and from examinations of texts in other subjects [ Brophy, 1990; Gagnon , 1987 ]. Tyson-Bernstein and Woodward (1986) concluded from their review that textbook publishers, in an effort to please everyone, try to include as many topics as possible rather than taking the time to develop a few central ideas. [ p. 25] This eye-opening paper was originally presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York, April 1996. In the second section [standards/ethics ], Carol A. Heintzelman discusses "Human Subjects and Informed Consent: The Legacy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study" This concise paper on the "longest non-therapeutic experiment conducted on human subjects in medical history" should be required reading for any course devoted to research methods. An interesting