As the education reform movement increasingly focuses on teachers and teaching, educators, policy-makers, and researchers need valid and reliable measures that can be used to evaluate individual teachers, provide guidance for improving teaching performance, and support research in ways that advance instruction and classroom dialog and practice. A…

Discusses the need to include studies of reliability and maintainability during the design of any system. Topic areas addressed include availability calculations, complex systems and standby redundancy, availability and malfunction levels, design techniques, fault trees, functional maintenance, and others. (DH)

A discussion of external evaluation of a college or university program or unit looks at two different approaches used in the United States for accreditation purposes--standards of good practice and competency-based learning and review. Methods of maintaining consistency and eliminating bias are examined briefly. (MSE)

Discusses the flaws in online catalogs that lead to ineffective library use, including confusing subject access, outmoded classification systems, lack of authority control, split files and closed catalogs, lack of both menu and command modes, and lack of circulation information. Recommendations are made for improving library catalogs. (EM)

Five contributors identify essential means for the college to assure high standards, quality control, and consistency in assessing the prior learning of adults. Types of learning include work or military experience and life experience; assessment methods include examination, portfolio examination, and competence-based programs. (Author/MSE)

Quality measures were originally developed for research aimed at describing the settings that children spend time in and identifying the characteristics of these environments that contribute to children's development. They were also developed to guide improvements in practice. Increasingly, however, measures of quality are being used for further…