Communities across the country are grappling with different approaches to improving their schools. Introducing or expanding charter schools is one of the approaches that states and school districts have considered or implemented. Charter schools serve more than 5 percent of public school students nationwide and make up close to 7 percent of all…

The paper examines varieties of program assessment in institutions of higher education and proposes a procedure to implement systematic assessment of program outcomes. Presented in a question-and-answer format, the paper first addresses common faculty concerns about formal assessment in sections titled, "Why Not Use GPA (Grade Point Average)?" and…

An overview is provided of the Quality First Process Model developed by Fox Valley Technical College (FVTC), Wisconsin, to provide guidelines for quality instruction and service consistent with the highest educational standards. The 16-step model involves activities that should be adaptable to any organization. The steps of the quality model are…

Although selecting goals and indicators is the most challenging task of performance funding, implementation requires development of other critical elements: success criteria to measure institutional performance; indicator weights for percent of funding allocated to each indicator; an allocation method for setting the relationship between…

Prepared by the Outcomes Assessment Task Force (OATF) at Owens Community College (OCC), in Ohio, this document describes the philosophy guiding assessment at OCC and provides a non-prescriptive guide for implementing an assessment plan. Part I provides an introduction to outcomes assessment at OCC, including OCC's assessment philosophy, a list of…

Pursuant to the Council of Ontario Universities' procedures for periodic quality reviews of undergraduate programs, auditors examined the policies and programs of the University of Ottawa (UO) during 1997. The English, Chemistry, and Physiotherapy departments were selected for audits of their program review procedures; the Environmental Studies…

The Institutional Self-Assessment Measure (ISAM) is presented, which was designed to aid local agency program managers and staff members in planning and improving implementation of competency-based education (CBE) programs. It is a structured tool to be used with the support of a trained ISAM facilitator to enhance communication among staff…

This publication reports on the progress that the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada has made to respond to the higher education needs of the northern region of Canada. In particular this report evaluates the progress made after 3 years on a series of formal recommendations proposed in 1988. The paper lists each of the recommendations and…

After a brief introduction offering three reasons people and institutions hesitate to commit themselves to a continuing process of "self-study-in-action," four types of administrative leadership activities are distinguished, those that: (1) respond to external emergencies/opportunities, (2) accomplish role-defined tasks, (3) define and…

In July 1989, the members of Project Cooperation, 10 community colleges that had been invited to serve as demonstration sites for research on institutional effectiveness, were brought together for the second national colloquium on institutional effectiveness through outcomes measures. This report contains the presentations made at the colloquium…

These two self-assessment inventories are designed to be used for evaluation of tech prep implementation at the middle/high school and postsecondary levels. The middle/high school version is intended to be completed by the district/school, the postsecondary form by the technical college. The form provides for rating the level of implementation as…