An innovative system-building initiative known as the STEM Learning Ecosystems Community of Practice (SLECoP) is transforming U.S. STEM education through cross-sector partnerships between schools, afterschool and summer programs, libraries, museums, and businesses, among others. Although logic models exist to describe how SLEs can make positive…

There is a growing body of research that suggests the first year of high school is a critical transition point for students. It also finds course-taking and successful completion of those courses in 9th grade to be valuable predictors of students' success in high school. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides states an opportunity to…

Federal policymakers have interest in three specific areas of postsecondary career and technical education (CTE): associate degrees and certificates awarded in CTE, skills and training obtained through noncredit courses, and industry-recognized certifications. Research and data are readily available on students earning degrees and certificates in…

This handbook presents a secondary program evaluation system to improve the quality of Oregon state-approved, secondary vocational education programs. Section 1 describes this evaluation system. It discusses the three levels of evaluation. The design includes provisions for review of Oregon minimum standards, federal and state vocational education…

This paper reports on Oregon's Database Initiative Project (DIP). In response to inconsistent financial reports and a lack of automation, a project team was assembled by Oregon's Department of Education in 1997 with the goal of providing detailed school-level data for the 1997-98 school year in 16 Oregonian school districts. Among the project's…

This report discusses the findings of a study that attempted to investigate the participation rates of students with disabilities in the Oregon statewide testing program. The study joined individual student data from the Oregon Statewide Assessment Program and the Oregon Special Education Child Count to examine participation rates. The report…

Designed to assist practitioners with the actual conduct of career education program evaluations in teacher education, this handbook has four sections which parrallel the evaluation process. The first section describes the evaluation process and the need to assess the audience to be in a better position to decide on the procedures to use and the…

The Council of Chief State School Officers has raised some issues pertinent to the implementation of a national project to collect statistical indicators of academic achievement and to compare them across states. The United States Department of Education shares this concern, with an emphasis on sampling schools for a school level analysis which…

This guide contains information designed to provide vocational directors and teachers with a process for collecting information to be used in evaluation and planning. The first section of the guide, consisting of information for use in local annual planning, outlines procedures for reviewing community data, evaluating existing programs, assessing…