Vocal Group Research Articles

On Creationism in the Astronomy Classroom

Recently in the United States, a small but vocal group of citizens has been promoting a view known as “creationism,” the assertion that the universe and everything in it was created in six days by divine fiat as suggested by a literalist interpretation of the Christian Bible. In a now common variant, “scientific creationism” or “creation-science,” they assert further that this version of creation is proven true on “scientific” evidence alone, independent of any religious underpinnings. Legislation requiring the teaching of creation-science alongside of evolution in the public schools has been proposed in over twenty states; in Louisiana and Arkansas such legislation was passed, although it was later struck down by federal courts as a violation of the separation of church and state.

A Brief Introduction to the Zulu Choirs

Black American four-part vocal harmony has roots that predate the Civil War. Although African traditional music is rich in polyphonic singing and its own peculiar harmonies, the simple triad is practically never found. The triad is a fundamental substructure of Western quartet harmony, and perhaps for this reason it has been mistakenly assumed that there are no strong African quartet-singing traditions. In fact, an expansive parallel heritage of four-part vocal music exists in South Africa, its origins dating back to the nineteenth century. Missionaries and white troupes were no doubt the first to introduce four-part vocal harmony on the African continent. During the 1890s an illustrious black musical company, Orpheus M. McAdoo's Virginia Jubilee Singers, spent a great deal of time performing in the country of South Africa. They sang not only for the white colonists but also for the indigenous black population, touching off an outbreak of chorus and quartet groups among black South Africans. At the same time, male quartets were being trained to sing American spirituals, in English, in mission schools and black universities. The same precepts of good harmony-singing practiced at American universities, the same refinement of four even, balanced, and blended voices were being taught to educated Zulus and other South African peoples. An impressive variety of vocal harmony styles are reasonably well represented on South African phonograph records. Literally hundreds of vocal groups have been commercially recorded there since about 1930. The earliest recordings yet uncovered come from a Columbia Record Company session by the Wilberforce Institute Singers of South Africa under the direction of Dr. Herman Cow, a black American educator living in Africa. His group recorded American spirituals in English, sung in the straight spiritual style of contemporaneous American university quartets. In 1930 HMV Record Company brought to London the Zulu musician and composer Reuben T. Caluza and his double quartet, consisting of four men and four women. One hundred and fifty selections were re-

Community provision for people with mental handicaps

This article discusses the findings and implications of a comprehensive survey of carers of people with mental handicaps recently undertaken in Dudley. The survey looked at the use and perceived need for services, and the question of the future care, accommodation, and support of this client group. The article draws attention to several key issues which emerged for providers of services in the community. Firstly, it notes that carers form a highly concerned and vocal group, eager to participate in the planning of service provision. Secondly, it points to the relationship which exists between knowledge of services and demand for services, and to that between the availability of services and satisfaction with services. Thirdly, it focuses on important differences in the attitudes of those caring for younger people and those caring for older people with mental handicaps. Finally, it stresses the growing need for careful planning of future services, especially for the time when carers can no longer cope.

Military Force and Civil Authority in the United Kingdom, 1914–1921

If liberal England died strangely, no moment in its passing was more bizarre than the close encounter it experienced between the army and a political system from which the military had been banished since the seventeenth century. Habitually all but invisible at home, confining its exploits to lands without the law, and maintaining a political silence equal—though in easier circumstances—to that of the neighboring grande muette, the British army moved to the center of the public stage. It obtained a popular following. This was not merely the result of Britain's involvement in world war. Manifestations of popular militarism, albeit sporadic or marginal, were evident in the later nineteenth century. The second Boer War accelerated a shift in social attitudes. Hostility to “pro-Boers,” if not beginning to resemble the hysteria of 1914, adumbrated the response of a shaken community temporarily recovering cohesion through warlike solidarity. Most public energy was expended in mafficking, but vocal groups continued to campaign for national efficiency and universal military service. The scout movement was the precipitant of a considerable mass sentiment, solidarized by suspicion of Germany and giving back a faint but clear echo of the leagues formed to support the expansion of the German army and navy.Yet if a novel enthusiasm was eroding traditional aversion to the army, it was scarcely capable of creating a public tolerance for its involvement in domestic affairs. Unlike the navy, whose nature more or less precluded its domestic employment, the army was a suspect weapon. The cultivation of nonpolitical professionalism represented in part a functional response to such public suspicion. Modern major generals would not think of doing what their Cromwellian predecessors had done.

Conversations in Leningrad, 1988

Certainly it was the year to visit the USSR, as one rubbed shoulders with pre-Summit reporters awaiting Reagan/Gorbachev, and pilgrims celebrating the millennium of Christianity in Russia. Wandering up the Nevsky Prospekt, you saw musicians hurrying with instrument cases in hand; and whichever way you crossed the Neva or the canals, the babel of language sounded like a session at the United Nations. As Tikhon Khrennikov (still Chairman of the Composers Union 40 years after its notorious 1948 Congress) pointed out in his welcoming address at the opening concert, the Festival's purpose was ‘for building spiritual bridges between nations using music as the unique and indispensable means of communication’. Stylistic restrictions were withdrawn so that listeners would get an unusually broad idea of the ‘many-sided panorama of modern musical art’. Thus, not only ‘serious’ music but also pop, jazz, folk, and traditional musics were performed. Having attended the previous two Festivals, it was very interesting to observe the progressive attitude of the Third. Not only was there more of everything, but more variety: not only symphonic, chamber, and choral music events, but also organ recitals, modern violin music, opera, children's theatre, a song evening, and even one for light music. Not only did the best Soviet conductors and performers participate, but also the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra, jazz groups of the USSR and elsewhere, and the British avant-garde vocal group ‘Electric Phoenix’. Although the concerts were heavily weighted with Soviet works, still almost 40 countries were represented (from Cuba to Mongolia) with works by more than 150 living composers.

Telling Lives

TELLING LIVES / Steve Weinberg WHEN ROBERT CARO finished his biography of Robert Moses in 1974, he marked an end to seven years of research on the man who built twentieth-century New York City, influencing urban planners the world over. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York won the PuUtzer Prize for biography as weU as the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book which "best represents the union of the historian and the artist." It was quite an accompUshment for a former newspaper reporter turned first-time biographer. The Power Broker did more than win accolades for Caro—it also deeply influenced the modern-day craft of biography. Biographers had a new model: The nearly 1300-page book was much longer than the average biography; artfuUy written while stiU adhering to chronology; unusual in the depth of its portrayal of Moses' times, as weU as of his life; heavily dependent on previously secret documents; daring in its analysis of Moses' motives; and quintessentiaUy muckraking. His book contrasted with that of the other biographer winning a PuUtzer Prize in 1975—Dumas Malone, who achieved the pinnacle in the history category for his sixvolume , thirty-four hundred page Ufe of Thomas Jefferson. Unlike Caro's book, Malone's admired its subject. Malone noted that after thirty-eight years of researching and writing the Jefferson volumes, the former president had "withstood microscopic examination even better than I expected. This is not to claim that his judgment was always right, but no one can read his voluminous state papers without gaining increased respect for his abiUty." Malone was more loathe than Caro to psychoanalyze his subject's motives, noting, "I must confess that even with the benefit of hindsight, I have often found it extraordinarily difficult to arrive at a defensible judgment as to what he ought to have done." The spiritual ancestor of Caro's work was Lytton Strachey's four biographical essays, pubUshed as Eminent Victorians in 1918. Srrachey revolutionized mainstream biography. His Uves were artfuUy presented , with an emphasis on "the inward creature." Strachey determinedly shattered the conventional wisdom about his four revered subjects, as did Caro about Moses. Reviewing The Power Broker in the Washington Post Book World (October 6, 1974), WiUiam Greider Steve Weinberg The Missouri Review · 249 said, "when a truly exceptional achievement comes along, there are no words to praise it. Important, awesome, compelling—these no longer summon the fuU flourish of trumpets this book deserves. It is extraordinary on many levels and, despite its price and length, it is certain to endure." The book had its detractors, to be sure. It was controversial not only because of its substance, but also because of its techniques, so it was bound to spark debate—as books that shake up the estabUshed order often do. Moses issued a twentythree page rebuttal. Dick Netzer was one angry reviewer among a smaU but vocal group. Writing in The New Republic (September 7, 1974), Netzer said, "Exposés make for bad biography, and this is an unusuaUy bad example of the genre." The disagreement among the reviewers was part of a debate that continues to this day: What makes for good biography? For centuries before Caro, there was Uttle discussion about biography as a craft, because it was not considered to be a separate discipline. As Katherine Frank said, "Depending on its subject, biography was generaUy considered a chameleon form: history, Uterary criticism, or what you read in bed at night, and there seemed Uttle need to go any further, theoreticaUy, than that" (Genre, Winter 1980). Reviewers of biographies for book pages usuaUy wrote about how the subject Uved his or her Ufe, rather than analyzing how the biographer told that life. AU of that began to change during the 1970s, as demonstrated by the controversy over Caro's effort. Fourteen years after the pubUcation of Caro's book, the debate about what constitutes responsible biography continues, fueled by a pubUshing explosion: During the 1980s, American pubUshers have issued an average of about 2000 biographies annuaUy. Readers flock to buy them. "A good many more people are interested in reading about...

Scott Joplin in Sedalia: New Perspectives

According to one reading of the available information, he arrived in Sedalia in 1894 as an unknown musician of twenty-five years of age, a good singer (with perfect pitch), the leader of an impressive vocal group, a reluctant cornetist, a pianist of exceedingly modest skills, an unpublished composer. By the time of his departure, seven years later, his fame and influence had spread far beyond Sedalia. His Maple Leaf Rag was quickly becoming a national phenomenon, earning him the title of the 'King of Writers. From our distant perspective it almost seems as if Scott Joplin's life began in Sedalia. We know practically nothing of his life prior to his arrival there, and even little enough of his years while in the town. But his impact during those years was so great that Joplin's Sedalia has been termed Cradle of Classic Ragtime and has been a focal point for ragtime scholarship for more than forty years. Telling Joplin's story is a process of piecing together a few documented facts with half-remembered, frequently contradictory anecdotes recalled by aged individuals. These facts and uncertain possibilities are then tied together with supposition to form a more-or-less cohesive narrative. There is little chance of certainty here. What we strive for is an account that is faithful to the few established facts while presenting plausible hypotheses for the rest. The distinction between these two components should always remain clear. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine selected facets of Joplin's life in Sedalia. This is done by testing accepted versions against the perspective of both previously discarded or unused information and newly discovered material. In some cases this new perspective yields new answers. More frequently, it presents contradictions, raises new questions,

“Let the Punishment Fit the Crime”: The Vocal Choreography of Cholly Atkins

From the Twenties through most of the Forties, American tap dance in the jazz/rhythm tradition experienced its heyday. Suddenly in the late Forties, the bottom dropped out for many rhythm tap dancers who had established successful careers in vaudeville, musicals, and with big bands. The great chronicler of jazz dance, Marshall Stearns, died wondering whether or not American vernacular dance was vanishing forever. Even today, many still believe that tap absolutely ended with the advent of rock-and-roll, or that it remained in a deep freeze until its revival in the late Sixties. However, the existence of black vocal groups such as those in the Motor Town Revue helped retain and preserve much of the vocabulary of American vernacular dance, including that of tap. The man largely responsible for this retention and cultural transference was Cholly Atkins, who worked as choreographer for Motown Records from 1965-1971.

Conserving the Constitution

In times of political and jurisprudential change, fatigue of mind may slip strange bedfellows under the same linguistic covers, providing, if little else, a fertile source of confusion. Certainly this is true of what now fits under the term conservatism. In politics, conservatism now may point to evangelists or yuppies, moralists or libertarians. In philosophy, conservatism refers to the economic theory of Milton Friedman and to the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, thinkers who share little but the University of Chicago. And in jurisprudence, the term is attached to two important recent books, Christopher Wolfe's The Rise of Modern Judicial Review and Richard Epstein's Takings, though if the former advocates a modest role for the courts, what the latter urges can only be called brazen. Conservatives of practically every stripe agree that something has gone wrong in the constitutional decisions of the federal courts in the last several decades, but beneath this consensus lies a fundamental split. For many, the fault is the thwarting of the political will when that will rests on a reasonable interpretation of the Constitution. These are the critics of the judicial activism of the Warren and Burger Courts. But for others, a smaller, but now vocal group, the fault is the courts' failure to thwart the democratic will-when it threatens property rights.'

The Decline of American Postmodernism

Postmodernism as a literary movement in the United States is now in its final phase of decadence. Ironically, the authenticity of its birth is still a hotly debated issue. A strong contingent of critics insists that ours is a late-modernist phase filled with minor talents. Anything that is not easily placed in this tradition is dismissed as worthless pop art. However, an increasingly vocal group of critics maintains that postmodernism does exist and make their cases by wielding Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan' (among others) as their supporters. So deep, in fact, is the contempt of academics for contemporary culture that they have canonized theorists and philosophers rather than the actual literary progenitors of the movement. Postmodernism is being redefined as a nonmovement whose literature consists mostly of translated theory, or else reactionary contemporary writers are being forced into the critical mold with often absurd assertions about their writing. Beyond this arena of contention, American culture moves into an era of postliterature. The term postmodern has found its way into general usage among writers and critics to describe a tendency in writing that follows the modernist impulse toward nonlinear form but abandons the modernist ideology in other social, political, and cultural areas. In their preface to The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised,2 George Butterick and Donald Allen name Charles Olson as the first American to use the term

Hypersensitivity to mercury from dental amalgams

A small but vocal group of dentists around the country is claiming that certain people have an extremely low tolerance for mercury and will exhibit signs and symptoms of mercury poisoning at very low body burdens of mercury. These dentists are terming this group of people hypersensitive to mercury and are advocating cutaneous patch testing to detect such hypersensitivity. Because of the different mechanisms involved in mercury poisoning versus bona fide type IV (cell-mediated, delayed) to mercury, as well as the dissimilar clinical manifestations of the two conditions, it is difficult to find any basis for such a diagnostic procedure. At least one mercury patch test kit is currently marketed for use by dentists.* The kit consists of foil packs of 0.02% mercuric chloride, rectangular adhesive bandages, evaluation forms, and instructions. In addition to the usual cutaneous signs evaluated in the interpretation of a conventional patch test, this test kit includes change in systolic Or diastolic blood pressure of -+ 10 mm Hg, change of • 10 beats per minute in pulse rate, body temperature change of --_0.5 ~ F, as well as the development of indigestion, blurred vision, headaches, irritability, fatigue, depression, redness of eyes, and other nonspecific signs and symptoms during the 48-hour test period in assessing hypersensitivity to mercury.] For example, if, dur-

Community Response to Low-Level Radioactive Waste: A Case Study of an Attempt to Establish a Waste Reduction and Incineration Facility

The Federal Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act of 1980 specified a 1986 deadline for the establishment of state and regional low-level radioactive waste disposal sites. There is little optimism that the deadline will be met. Morris K. Udall has introduced Bill HR 1083 in Congress which proposes extending the deadline to 1993 and specifying a 40 percent reduction in the volume of wastes shipped. Waste volume can be reduced through incineration and compaction technologies. However, it may be as difficult to convince communities that a waste treatment facility is a good investment as it is to convince them that a disposal site is worth having. In other words, the waste volume reduction argument may ultimately depend on cutbacks in the nuclear industry. This research reports one community's response to the possibility of a low-level radioactive waste compaction and incineration facility. The case is especially interesting because the community needs new industries and has a history of living with a nuclear materials facility. In spite of that the community's response was quite negative, fueled by a vocal local opposition group and anti-nuclear activists. Survey data indicates that despite general opposition people still feel the need for more information on radioactive materials and are willing to attend education sessions if the time and place are convenient. Suggestions are given for those considering future attempts to establish low-level radioactive waste reduction facilities.

Primary Schoolteachers in Nineteenth-Century France: A Study of Professionalization through Conflict

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES, scholars have often considered many of the professions to be the natural offspring of the global processes of modernization. Countless studies relate professional development to the broader currents of technological change or structural differentiation. Moreover, since the professions were seen as having a common parentage, much research has been devoted to identifying the characteristics and developmental patterns that all of them shared. In recent years, an increasingly vocal group of researchers has challenged earlier findings. They reject the taxonomic approaches that produced lists of traits supposedly exhibited by all professions because of the inability to apply the lists of criteria to concrete situations.7 In addition, the growing recognition that the professions display considerable diversity in their organizational structures and patterns of development has raised questions about the connections between modernization and professionalization. An alternative approach suggests that the functions, ideologies, and organization of professions derive not so much from large, impersonal forces but from a series of struggles for power and preferment. In this case study of nineteenth-century secular French primary schoolteachers, I argue in support of just such a conflict theory of professional development. We shall see that professionalization was generated by the interplay between teachers and other participants in the funding and control of elementary education, particularly the Catholic Church, families, and the state. This new professional project, however, often ran counter to the visions of schooling and the teacher's place in society held by many priests, parents, and government officials. In the ensuing disputations, teachers responded to their critics by developing a distinctive professional trajectory that was carefully crafted to overcome or coopt their detractors. Thus teacher pro-

The Palpable Osler: A Study in Survival

THE PALPABLE OSLER: A STUDYIN SURVIVAL CHARLES G. ROLAND* Although he died in 1919 and did not live in North America after 1905, Sir William Osier's name is still recognized by most physicians on this continent—and by many nonphysicians as well. A remarkably large coterie read about Osier, collect Osleriana of all kinds, join clubs and societies eponymizing the man, and write articles about him. For at least a few observers of this phenomenon, the adulation seems extreme and unwarranted, and so a small but occasionally vocal group of "antiOslerians " has arisen. Some of these sceptics have suggested that Osier really did little or nothing to deserve his immortality. He did not win the Nobel Prize. He made no epoch-making discoveries. He invented no important procedures or tests or devices. His clinical writings are dated. With minor qualifications, I believe these criticisms are correct. But the fact ofOsier's continued preeminence stands before us to confute (or at least confuse) the sceptics. And so the question arises quite naturally: Why Osier? I propose to attempt to answer that question. Biographical Outline William Osier was born onJuly 12, 1849, in the hamlet ofBond Head, 40 miles north of Toronto [I]. He was the eighth of nine children born to Ellen Osier, an indomitable lady who survived past her onehundredth birthday, living to see one son Canada's most distinguished trial lawyer, another ajudge ofthe Ontario Court ofAppeals, a third son a highly successful financier, and a fourth the best-known physician in the English-speaking world. William's father, Featherstone Osier, was the Anglican clergyman in Bond Head, having accepted an evangelical calling that took him from an exciting youth in the Royal Navy to what must have been an equally exciting maturity battling God's enemies and This paper was presentedjointly to the American Osier Society and as a presentation in the Leaders in American Medicine series, Francis A. Countway Library, Boston, Massachusetts , April 29, 1980. ?Professor of the history of medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8N 3Z5, Canada.© 1984 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/84/2702-0383J01.00 Perspectives inBiology and Mediane, 27, 2 · Winter 1984 | 299 the elements in the sparsely populated bush of early nineteenth-century Ontario. The Osiers came to their new home in 1837, 12 years before Will's birth. As the Osier family grew, and began to grow up, the lack of educational opportunities in the area of the tiny hamlet of Bond Head made a move imperative. In 1857, when Will was 8, the opportunity came. The rectorship of Ancaster and Dundas became vacant, and the family moved to Dundas, which was to be the Osier family home for 25 years. Will was an active and mischievous child, and numerous stories have survived ofjokes and pranks—the most extreme of which ended in an overnight stay injail—that have the aura of prediction about them. But Osier was also a fine student and a God-fearing young man who planned to pursue his father's vocation in the church. Fate, however, ruled otherwise. Before entering university, he was sent to a private school in Weston, Ontario (now a suburb of Toronto), run by the Reverend W. A. Johnson. Father Johnson was not only an Anglican priest and schoolmaster ; he was also an ardent biologist who introduced many of his pupils, including young Will, to the mysteries of microscopy. Osier collected specimens, sliced preparations, made slides, studied them—and discovered a more compelling world than the church and the manse: science. He did go on to enroll at Trinity College, in Toronto, in divinity, but after 1 year he switched to medicine. By this time he had been further influenced by his growing friendship with Dr.James Bovell, a prominent physician and naturalist in Toronto. It was probably Bovell who advised Osier to leave the Toronto School of Medicine and to study at McGiIl instead. So in the autumn of 1870, aged 21, Osier transferred to McGiIl Medical College for the final 2 years of medicine, graduating in 1872. And at McGiIl he came to know, to love, and to be loved by, the great teacher...

Textbook of Pediatric Emergency Medicine

Once upon a time, a small but vocal group of pediatricians began to agitate the halls of academic pediatrics about the need for recognition of something they called comprehensive care . While these assistant professors, and I count myself among them, were never terribly precise about their definition of this term, they did agree that it involved those areas of pediatrics that their more traditional academic colleagues did not view as important or scholarly or scientific. During the ensuing 20 or more years, I have watched the catch phrases change with the seasons: comprehensive care turned into primary care, pediatric clinics turned into ambulatory care , and public health turned into community pediatrics , or its more recent version, community-oriented primary care . Despite these changes in labels, the definitions of the scope of these general areas of pediatric medicine have remained vague. At best, one can say that all of these phrases describe

THE SOUND SIGNALS OF THE ADULT AVOCET RECURVIROSTRA A VOSETTA DURING THE PERINATAL PHASE

SummaryRecordings of Avocet vocalizations were collected from three pairs, using a microphone placed close to nests at the end of incubation in a colony on the French Atlantic coast, in Vendée.From sonagraphic analyses, ten vocal structures were identified and described. Particular attention is given to the internal components of each call in an attempt to demonstrate structural relationships. In terms of general melodic features, three vocal groups are identified: chuckle calls, ascending chirping calls and sustained calls with whistled components. The existence of numerous gradation forms is emphasized.Verification of gestural behaviour at the time of the recordings additionally allows the context of emission to be clarified. It is distinguished thus: parental calls, calls concerned in the maintenance of individual distance and calls produced in the presence of predators.Finally, the Avocet sound signals are compared with those of other species, mainly waders.

Uncle Bob's Club Child Development Centre

In this International Year of the Disabled Person, the needs of all persons with a disability are being look at more critically, but perhaps the general public is more aware of adults with a disability, than of young children. Young children with disabilities are not a vocal group as such, although their parents are becoming increasingly vocal and banding together into effective Action Groups. Young children with disabilities may be thought to be “cute”, and the general public is relieved that they have parents who are responsible for them. But those same children experience acute frustrations, and their parents experience chronic grief because their child is unable to lead a normal life. Many find it necessary to expend a tremendous amount of time and emotional effort on the physical care and intellectual stimulation of their child, and in many cases, the increased financial demands can be critical for the family budget.

Does Federalism Have Relevance to Government Reorganization for the Third Century?

Within the constitutional framework, the politics of intergovernmental relations has been shaped and is likely to be shaped in the future. In order to understand the relevance of federalism to government reorganization one must, I think, review the key constitutional debates of the last two hundred years that concern the relations between the states and the national government. The general outcome of these debates has been to strengthen national authority at the expense of the states. The major problem of government reorganization is growing national authority coupled with the political and organizational power of civil servants, congressional staffs, and highly vocal interest groups. In the face of these factors, states and local governments are losing their capacity for independent action. How one addresses the problems of government reorganization will be dealt with in the later sections of this article.

Extended vocal techniques

Abstract The article gives a brief description of extended vocal techniques from its inception in the avant‐garde of the fifties and early sixties. Some related techniques in jazz and folk‐music are mentioned. Three different approaches in recent music (Extended Vocal Techniques group, Prima Materia and Joan LaBarbara) are contrasted with recent vocal pieces by John Cage.

Perceptual/social aspects of learning to read: A transactional process

For centuries philosophers and educators have tried to understand the nature and order of human learning. The current status of understanding of the educational process suggests that we need more effective inquiry procedures. We shall report here a series of studies based on a transactional perspective. Inquiry contributed by Maxwell, Dewey, Heisenberg, and Dewey and Bentley introduced transactional inquiry.1 The notion that people and things have constantly changing properties, that understanding of a child can be gained only through understanding within a context, and that people in a setting are interdependent and have mutual impact on each other, were espoused by Maxwell, Dewey and Bentley. Within the transactional perspective, we must set observations free of preconceived ideas about people and things, and recognize that one cannot study or observe a phenomenon without influencing the phenomenon and oneself in the process. While the uncertainty of human transactions does not allow one to promise that an approach will be effective, there might be ways to maximize the probability of effectiveness. Out of the transactional perspective, we can abstract several conditions under which educational research might be most useful: (1) ideas should evolve out of the setting, (2) prospective recipients should participate at all levels of planning, (3) research should be conducted within the natural setting, (4) a major purpose of the research should be description of what occurs under given conditions, and (5) research should be action-oriented.2 I will discuss a school-based project in order to describe a transactional approach to behavioral science research. The project is currently in its third year, with the first year a pilot study that was funded in part by the Tennessee State Department of Education. The subsequent two years and one year to come are being supported by a Title III grant. In a semi-rural Tennessee county, a vocal group of parents began to call attention to early