The community college environment is complex and dynamic, requiring constant monitoring. To ensure that workforce education, a core component of community colleges' missions, remains aligned with colleges' environments, responsive to employers' needs, suited to students' interests and abilities, and current in content and technology, it is…

This brief describes how investments in student data systems are taking family engagement and student achievement to a whole new level. In addition to addressing areas where a student most needs improvement, the data can serve as a catalyst for home-school communication. Parents benefit from having information about key indicators on which they…

Business students are increasingly seeking international experience in short-term, study abroad programs to enhance their intercultural knowledge, intercultural communication skills, and global perspectives to be more competitive in the global arena. Intuitively, universities initiating these programs and the students sojourning abroad believe in…

A number of U.S. cities, including five supported by Wallace, have been building new systems of high-quality out-of-school time programming citywide. But what should supporters do to ensure that these young systems endure, during the immediate economic crisis and for the long term? This report on a recent Wallace-sponsored conference that gathered…

School nurses often find themselves developing health-related programs for children and adolescents. One way to create compelling and interesting programs that meet the needs of students is to include them in the planning, development, and evaluation of such programs through focus groups. Children provide a perspective about their particular…

This paper summarizes the many uses of the California Postsecondary Education Commission's data system and describes work in progress on adding additional data elements. It describes how the Commission is using its Longitudinal Student Data System (LSDS) to examine the movement of students through California's public colleges and universities. The…

This paper discusses a role group sharing meeting held July 30-31, 1979 in Windsor, Connecticut, and attended by documentors and evaluators. Examined, in documentation form, are issues and learnings from the sharing meeting and an analysis of the design of the meeting, which was a pilot for other network role group meetings anticipated during the…

Matching Needs and Services (MNS) is a practice tool intended to help people who work with vulnerable children use rigorously assembled information on needs as a guide to design, implement, and evaluate more-effective services. To do this, MNS focuses on needs but links them to outcomes and thresholds before dealing with the services to achieve…

Medical information should be integrated into the planning of special education programs. Educators need to be aware of the value of medical information, establish communication with family physicians, and arrange for storage and retrieval of such information. (CJ)

U.S. program model designs used for children who are gifted were analyzed for their potential applications for rural schools of developing countries such as South Africa. Program trends and practices are identified from analysis of 100 descriptive and experimental studies of the last 10 years. A bibliography of the studies is included. (SW)

This report describes a project designed to provide a cost effective centralized data collection, analysis, and retrieval system to handle all data on adult basic education (ABE) clients and staff personnel for all adult learning sites in Massachusetts for reporting, research, and evaluation purposes at local and State levels. This report is…

Imagine if, at the start of the school year, a teacher could have detailed information about the academic history of every student in her or his classroom. This is possible if the teacher can log on to a Web site that provides access to an educational data warehouse. The teacher would see not only several years of state assessment results, but…

Policies and issues associated with the privacy and security of criminal history information are presented. The first chapter discusses general concepts regarding privacy and security of criminal justice information, including definitions of basic terms, considerations of interests requiring attention when developing policy, relevance of fair…

Government and private agencies in Alberta, Canada, have voluntarily joined to establish the Alberta Disability Database, to bring statistical order out of the numerical chaos of disability data. This paper discusses the program's financing, confidentiality, definitions, access, archiving, consultation, and coordination. (JDD)

A project was conducted at the University of Illinois (1) to test and refine the components of the dissemination system developed for program improvement efforts in the state; and (2) to provide technical assistance to funding agency staff, project staffs, and persons/networks/agencies that facilitate access to a product in the dissemination…