This paper describes a death education curriculum designed for and field-tested on verbally expressive adults with mental retardation. The Communicating About Loss and Mourning (CALM) curriculum was presented to an experimental group in 8 sessions each lasting 50 minutes. Lectures and group discussions were used to convey information about death…

This paper concerns itself with a diverse set of applications of the Operationalization of Fuzzy Concepts (OFC) procedure -- a systematic method for breaking a fuzzy statement of intent, a goal, or a fuzzy concept, into observable, measurable components. The paper assumes that the reader has some prior familiarity with the technique. The…

Administrators and supervisors bear much of the responsibility for seeing that many things currently not happening in the language arts classroom do happen. Perhaps they do not take leadership in the language arts area because they are uncertain as to what elements make a good program. There are eight essential elements to look for in a good…

A systems approach is applied to the assessment of the Model 4 project (administered by Mountain-Plains Education and Economic Development Program, Inc.), a residential career education program for rural, multiproblem families in the States of Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. The program involves three phases of…

This paper provides: (1) a statement regarding the political context for energy conservation education programs; (2) a brief description of the types of program efforts reflected in the literature; (3) an overview of the purposes and approaches to energy conservation education program evaluation reflected in available literature; and (4) a…

Decision-making and change models can take many forms. One researcher (Nordvall, 1982) has suggested five conceptual models for introducing change: a political model; a rational decision-making model; a social interaction decision model; the problem-solving method; and an adaptive/linkage model which is an amalgam of each of the other models.…

Since 1975 the Contoocook Valley District, a small rural cooperative school district in southwestern New Hampshire, has developed a performance-based student competency program which has resulted in a dramatic increase in scores on the Stanford Achievement Test. The district is comprised of 9 towns, covers an area of almost 300 square miles, and…

In planning any new reading program, teachers should know exactly what they want to accomplish. This requires careful identification of overall goals and objectives. During this first step in planning, all of the teachers who will be affected by the program should submit lists of the reading skills that they believe are pertinent at their grade…

Two related objectives in this report are: (1) to discover psychometrically a structure underlying secondary school social studies teachers' responses to those items in an instrument which pertained to what the "new" social studies ought to be emphasizing, and (2) to contribute to the development of scales measuring the domain of such ought-to-be…

Discusses the current status, significance, and future of credentialing in the field of environmental health. Also discusses four phases of a Bureau of Health Professions (BHP) Credentialing Program and BHP-funded projects related to their development and implementation. Phases include role delineation, resources development, examination…

Staff development is a school district activity that is generating more activity and becoming more expensive. As the amount of dollars spent increases, so will the demands for accountability and results. Traditional methods for determining staff development programs are inadequate or incomplete. A more effective method is to relate the staff…

The paper describes a critical peer review developed at Napier Polytechnic (NP) of Edinburgh, Scotland for the evaluation and monitoring of its courses. Illustrations of the system are based on the accounting courses offered by the Department of Accounting and Law. The paper first describes the creation of NP from an amalgamation of two colleges…

Teachers rely on mental planning throughout the design, implementation, and evaluation phases of instruction. This paper focuses on the elementary school teacher's use of instructional design (ID) skills in the planning and delivery of instruction, emphasizing the relative and "real" use of ID practices in both mental and written…

The Commission for Teacher Preparation and Licensing of the State of California has for the past three years been operating an External Assessment Pilot Project. Community and professional constituents of teacher education programs review those programs to determine whether or not they conform to earlier program plans submitted to the commission…

The Division of Program Evaluation and Research of the Los Angeles County Superintendent's Office provides program evaluation consultation services to all local educational agencies (grades K-14) in Los Angeles County. The three program evaluation services that are described are: (1) Educational Program Evaluation Planning Assistance, (2)…