Intended to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework to serve as a scaffold for past, present, and future research on "scholastic journalism" (journalism in the secondary school), a topical content analysis of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Secondary Education Division research, teaching, and issues sessions for the years 1977 to 1989 was undertaken. Papers or teaching sessions were placed into one or more of 13 categories, including censorship and legal and ethical issues, electronic media/technology, established media, financial concerns, publication production, and visual content. A list of 182 primary and secondary subject headings was developed, based on indexing practices in a number of existing electronic databases, to serve as key words for a newsletter indexing program. The categories derived from the AEJMC program topical content analysis were compared to the 37 masters theses and doctoral dissertations in the "high school media" category of "Journalism Abstracts" for the same period. Results indicated that legal and ethical issues were the primary conceptual area for scholastic journalism researchers. Results also indicated that history and cultural diversity were two conceptual areas that were slighted by researchers. (Thirty-nine footnotes, five tables and four figures of data, and a figure representing a conceptual model of scholastic journalism are included; 116 references, a list of dissertations and theses, the newsletter indexing key word list, and a list of studies concerned with secondary school journalism are attached.) (RS)