This booklet provides some systematic guidelines for assisting educational planners to discriminate between high-quality educational research and research that should not be relied on for decision making. The guidelines focus on educational research studies that employ either experimental or survey-research methodologies. A checklist is presented that contains 10 criteria for making judgments about research design and serves as an evaluative framework for educational planning. In general terms the checklist is divided according to (1) problem; (2) literature review; (3) hypotheses and questions; (4) design and method; (5) sampling; (6) measures; (7) statistics; (8) results; (9) discussion; and (10) write up. An important distinction is made between results that are statistically significant and those that are educationally meaningful. Thirteen tables and two figures in two appendixes present some research examples. (Contains 8 references.) (SLD)