This article provides an analysis of 20 years of key policy reports addressing the challenges and opportunities in integrating technology into K-12 education in the United States. It summarizes recommendations made in these reports, and comments on the shifting rationales for and expectations of educational technology investments that have shaped those recommendations. In undertaking this analysis, we have been guided by three key sets of questions: a) Why do we invest in educational technologies? What rationales have shaped these investments? b) What are the requisite steps to ensure that technologies are effectively implemented? What specific recommendations have been given priority? c) What assumptions underlie our vision for how technologies can impact teaching and learning, and how have these changed?

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This paper looks back on the past three decades of educational technology research as a basis for discussing where this field of research is heading, and identifying some of the most promising directions for the future development of technology's role in education. The collaborative efforts of the Center for Children and Technology and the Union City, New Jersey, school district are discussed to illustrate many of the lessons learned about how educational technology research and systemic school improvement efforts can best be coordinated with one another. This paper offers a perspective that grows out of what we, at EDC's Center for Children and Technology, have learned from nearly three decades of research on educational technology (http://www.edc.org/CCT). Rather than providing a detailed account of what we now know about the impact of technology on learning, we discuss where the research field is heading and review what we think of as the most promising directions for technology's role in education [1][2][3].

Interest in the clinical interview method as an alternative research tool to standardized testing procedures raises questions about the type of analysis applicable when using this technique. Hermeneutics is considered as a model for analyzing the clinically informed research interview; specifically, the model of hermeneutic analysis developed by the French philosopher Paul Ricceur is examined. Ricceur attempts to resolve the dichotomy that arose with 19th century hermeneutics, between explanation (as the province of the natural sciences) and understanding (as the province of the human sciences), by making the text into the central problematic of hermeneutics. Ricceur’s ‘paradigm of the text’ is discussed, and the clinical research interview is analyzed to determine whether it meets Ricceur’s criteria of textuality.