In 2007, the Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) requested that the RAND Corporation monitor implementation of year 2 (2007-2008) of the district's Excellence for All (EFA) initiative and provide feedback to district staff, the PPS board, and other stakeholders. In 2008, RAND expanded to a more comprehensive focus on effective implementation of EFA's…

This study was designed to assess the impact of "Mathematics Pathways and Pitfalls" ("MPP") on the mathematics that second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students learn. The specific research questions that were addressed are: (a) What is the impact of "MPP" on students' knowledge of the mathematics topics addressed,…

Flexibility is a lever for change that occupies an increasingly prominent place in federal strategies for educational improvement. Flexibility assumes that local actors are in the best position to identify the most serious problems facing schools and students and to determine how to solve them. Consequently, these actors should be given greater…

The National Consortium on Leadership and Disability for Youth (NCLD-Youth) is one of 15 Youth Resource, Information, and Training Centers focused on empowering youth and emerging leaders with developmental disabilities. The NCLD-Youth is a youth-led center with partners in the District of Columbia as well as in the states of Florida and New…

The English as a Second Language (ESL) department is City College of San Francisco's (CCSF's) (California) largest department, offering both credit and non-credit classes and accounting for 3,993 credit students and 21,025 noncredit students in fall 1993. To gather data on Department success, a study was conducted to determine successful course…

Information is provided on a practicum that addressed the lack of access to computer-aided instruction by elementary level students with learning disabilities, due to lack of diverse software, limited funding, and insufficient teacher training. The strategies to improve the amount of access time included: increasing the number of computer programs…

This document contains a brief report and project materials from the Tech Prep Initiative, which forged a partnership of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the Wisconsin Technical College System, and the University of Wisconsin System to provide an articulated avenue of study that moves a student through high school and into a…

A study was conducted to compare the attitudes of two- and four-year college chief academic administrators, deans, and department heads in Oklahoma toward community college education. The "Junior College Attitude Survey" was administered to 491 administrators in the 27 public higher education institutions in Oklahoma, soliciting…

This document is a detailed report on the second year of a 6-year study of the effectiveness of a state-sponsored preschool program for 4-year-old children from low-income families in the state of Washington. The Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP) takes a whole child approach, emphasizes the involvement of parents in planning…

The purpose of this document is to provide teachers, administrators, students, and parents with samples of students' performances that exemplify standards in relation to the 1993 Grade 9 Science Performance-Based Assessment Tasks for the province of Alberta, Canada. A sample of 698 randomly selected students from 31 schools did the…

This practicum was designed to improve communication practices among teachers and between teachers and parents in an elementary school. An emphasis was placed on utilizing the writing skills of students to link teachers and parents through a communication partnership. The partnership was accomplished through the expansion of the student reading…

As individuals mature, they show increasing responsibility for events in their lives, but with variation in this form of maturation from one individual to another. These individual differences can be observed in doctoral candidates' activities associated with completion of the doctoral dissertation. The purpose of this study was to assess doctoral…

Over the past decade, faculty in the Humanities department at Raritan Valley Community College, in New Jersey, have developed two interdisciplinary, team-taught courses organized on a thematic basis. To determine student and faculty perceptions of these courses, the college distributed questionnaires to students in one of the courses, conducted…

As part of a college-wide assessment effort, St. Petersburg Junior College (Florida) conducted a survey of enrolled students in October 1995 to determine their perceptions of the quality of the college's academic and student support services. Questionnaires were distributed to 6,197 students, asking them to rate 28 college services on a 5-point…

This study determined the effects of three levels of clinical experiences on teacher education students' perceptions of the importance and performance of various teacher attributes. Measures of importance and performance were obtained from a sample of 216 (37 male, 179 female) teacher education students from Jacksonville State University (Alabama)…