It is a cliche to talk about 'the information explosion' but it is a fact, nonetheless, that in the last 30 years or so new knowledge has been accumulating at a faster and faster rate. It took 32 years (1907-1938) for Chemical Abstracts to publish its first one million citations ...

One of the most interesting and remarkable developments in education during the 1960s and 70s was the growth of the teachers' centre movement. A British invention, it almost immediately attracted a great deal of interest from educationalists in other countries, so much so that during the 1970s, it became, according ...

In Christchurch the number of Pacific Island children is small, they live in every area of the city, from 'working class industrial' to 'middle-class suburban', and most are New Zealand-born Samoans. The families rarely shift and their children rarely change schools, at least between the ages of five and eight ...

Women are under-represented in senior positions in both the primary and the secondary teaching services. But why? Judy Whitcombe has been conducting a research project in the Department of Education's Research and Statistics Division, stimulated by the Education and the Equality of the Sexes Conference in 1975 and requested by ...

How much of a child's development is influenced by the school he attends? Barbara Maughan and Janet Ouston- two of the research workers involved in the publication of the widely acclaimed Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and their Effects on Children- consider the question and assess the implications of their ...

An understanding of validity, reliability and usability are a must for all test users. The validity of a test is an indication of how well it measures what the author claims it will measure; its reliability describes the consistency or dependability of its scores; and its usability is concerned with ...

A test evaluation sheet for teachers.

Despite the considerable differences in the rates at which students learn, almost all pupils can satisfactorily understand and be proficient in school subjects.

These are comments from the noted Sociologist, Willard Waller, in 1932. After 50 years and nearly 500 research papers there  seems to have been little change. Indeed, in recent literature one finds repeated reference to 'discipline' and 'classroom methods' problems, as well as to the 'idealism' of young neophyte teachers ...

Until very recently, computer assisted instruction was a sophisticated area of research that involved very large computer systems. Often the computer was centrally based at a university or technical institute and accessible via remote terminals linked to the computer by a telephone connection. The capital cost of such equipment is ...