This article provides an innovative meta-framework comprising strategies designed to guide qualitative data collection in the 21st century. We present a meta-framework comprising strategies for collecting data from interviews, focus groups, observations, and documents/material culture. We present a template for collecting nonverbal data during…

The National Forum on Education Statistics (Forum) is a cooperative of state, local, and federal education agencies. The goal of Forum activities is to improve the quality of education data gathered for use by policymakers and programmatic decision-makers. One approach to furthering this goal has been to pool the collective experiences of Forum…

Discusses problems of classifying racial and ethnic groups when collecting statistical data. Argues that surveys must acknowledge the great diversity of the American population and give respondents the freedom to choose the group or groups to which they belong. (FMW)

This report of a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) pilot project, which was carried out during 1982-84 in Khartoum (Sudan) to develop a vehicle for providing access to information on research in progress, describes: (1) the study that led to the conclusion that a national register of research projects was…

Two articles describe National Shelflist Count project organized 13 years ago under auspices of American Library Association's Resources and Technical Services Division to collect and publish comparative data about strengths and growth of major North American research collections. History, limitations, usefulness, and recommendations of 1983 task…

Designed for teachers and researchers interested in the study of the composing process, this guide introduces a method of analysis that can be applied to data from a range of different cases. Specifically, the guide offers a simple, direct coding scheme for describing the movements occurring during composing that involves four procedures: teaching…

An environmental scanning system was developed by the admissions office of a graduate school of management in a small southeastern university. The school's strategic planning committee felt that it would be beneficial to acquire information concerning issues, trends, and possible events that might impact upon the school in the future and to…

Information available on rural education remains startlingly inadequate--partly because of the great diversity of rural areas, because agencies responsible for data collection disagree on the definition of small/rural schools, and because large metropolitan schools have received far more than their share of attention, research, and financial…

A guide to acquiring information needed about postsecondary education outcomes is presented for campus and state-level officials. Attention is directed to: over 200 outcome measures or indicators; standard definitions of each outcome measure; data sources and procedures to acquire data for each outcome measure; and suggestions concerning the…