Educational Researcher

This article explores two forms of research on practice: formal research and practical inquiry. Formal research is undertaken by researchers and practitioners to contribute to an established and general knowledge base. Practical inquiry is undertaken by practitioners to improve their practice. It is suggested that practical inquiry is more likely than formal research to lead to immediate classroom change; that these two forms of research are fundamentally different; and that both are useful to practice, but in different ways.

When we conceive of knowledge as what is created in discourse, the role of interpretation in the assessment of complex performances becomes critical. Since an assessment system is always defined within an ideology, we discuss the possibility of framing interpretations within that ideology to produce consistent judgments. We propose ways of structuring and formulating interpretations within a dimensional framework and of making them explicit and visible in the writing of interpretive summaries. The discussion in this article reflects the constant tension between the requirement to make assessment decisions and the fact that the performances and their assessment are considered to be acts of interpretation which do not easily accommodate the notion of correctness.

During the past half century, three pronounced trends in state policy have occurred: Districts and schools have dramatically risen in enrollments; states have steadily raised their share of revenues for public schools; and local shares have declined. Yet organization theory and evidence suggest that these trends would make public education less efficient. This hypothesis is tested in 38 states that voluntarily cooperated in administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress mathematics examination to random within-state samples of eighth-grade students. Both correlations and regressions (controlling for per-student expenditures and student demographics) show that achievement is inversely related to both size indexes and state funding share. Achievement is inversely but insignificantly related to per-student funding.