This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…

The uses and restrictions of commonality analysis are described. Commonality analysis has been increasingly used as a method to examine the relative importance of independent variables, through the partitioning of variance among the variables of the regression equation into unique and common components. The effects of all other independent…

Contains a report of the application of Markov chain analysis to develop a model with analytical and predictive use for planning education for work. A flow model and the Markov chain theory are applied to data from the University of Khartoum. Advantages and limitations of the model are also listed. (CT)

Increasing demands for accurate forecasts in such areas as student enrollment, energy expenditures, and facility capacity are placing new demands on the institutional researcher. A variety of forecasting models and methods are available, all to be used with caution in long-range forecasting. (Author/MSE)

Discusses importance of academic planning and describes a model-based decision support system for academic units in a university hierarchy. This system integrates macro-level decisions by examining individual departments' budgets to determine future plans. Quantitative techniques for forecasting change are reviewed, including use of spreadsheet…

This report was written to provide guidance in the development and evaluation of alternative instructional approaches that hold promise of improving instructional effectiveness. The main focus of the report is on how to identify and test interactive relationships between individual differences among learners and instructional conditions or…

Background information is provided on the development and activities of Project Cooperation, a demonstration project to help institutions improve educational effectiveness by employing outcomes measures and assessment strategies. After highlighting the various activities of the project (e.g., a national survey, research on different plans and…

This manual addresses the Comprehensive System of Personnel Development (CSPD) requirement of Public Law 94-142. It presents model procedures for the collection of data necessary to project personnel needs in special education. Implementation of the model will identify: areas of education which show need for additional teachers as well as areas of…

This manual presents procedures for collecting data to project personnel needs in the field of special education, addressing in part the Comprehensive System of Personnel Development requirements of Public Law 94-142. Implementation of the procedures identifies: areas of education that show need for additional teachers as well as areas of surplus;…