DR. SUBOTNIK: Marty gave me a wonderful format in which to come to this next portion of the agenda and I hope you will see how beautifully the Raudenbush paper also encompasses all of the principles that Marty and I will be addressing shortly.

I would like to give you a little background on why this forum was created. Basically all of our organizations have a number of members and constituents and the glory of our organizations is reflected in the diversity of opinions that exist within our organization. The shift in education priorities for funding really elicited a lot of debate and in some cases distress among our communities and so we came together as organizations in order to come up with a constructive way to address these issues and that is the purpose of this forum.

What do we really want to come out of this forum? At the end Janice Earle is going to be pulling this all together, but we thought we would put in your minds some goals that we as the organizing committee had and see how it fleshes out at the end. Because we are working as educators and educational researchers in a context that includes current policy directions, limited resources, and limited access to schools, not every school district is welcoming us with opening arms.

We would like to see coming out of this forum some new ideas for training doctoral and postdoctoral students to operate optimally under these conditions. We also want to promote more collaborative projects that capitalize on expertise from various methodologists and this may be a way to reduce stress that we put on schools by working together on projects and not having a shotgun, buckshot approach to approaching school districts.

Finally, we have another project we hope will be elicited by this forum. Since the selection of appropriate methods and the order of their implementation is not something to be done arbitrarily and requires expert judgment, we would like to see as an outgrowth some kind of document that would provide rubrics or guidance to researchers and consumers about which methods should be used under which conditions and in what order, and we hope that you will be thinking about this as well.

I am going to now shift gears and move over to the table and invite our panelists for the first session to join me.