Through a year-long study of welfare-to-work students in the community college CalWORKs program, we investigated what self-authorship development looks like by examining developmental progress, and whether there are patterns in development along the three dimensions of self-authorship. Findings demonstrate progress toward self-authorship, but…

This study compared a value-added approach to school accountability to the currently used metrics of accountability in California of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and Academic Performance Index (API). Five-year student panel data (N?=?53,733) from 29 elementary schools in a large California school district were used to address the research…

Observation measures of instructional quality tend to fall into two broad categories--those for use across subject areas and those intended for use in specific subject areas. The move toward content-specific measures is a result of research suggesting that effective teaching looks different across subject areas and that both content knowledge and…

This brief, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, examines how rural families use four of the major federal child nutrition programs. It finds that 29 percent of rural families with children participate but that there are barriers to these nutrition programs, such as the lack of public transportation and high operating costs for rural schools…

In January 2009, in the last week of the Bush Administration, the U.S. Department of Education (ED), upon orders from the departing political appointee staff, published the final report in a long running National Evaluation of Upward Bound (UB). The study was conducted by the contractor, Mathematica Policy Research. After more than a year in…

The research problem for this qualitative study was "Effective response to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) by school leadership is critical to public school success or failure in Indiana. Because high schools have been the first and most-often to 'fail' under NCLB, knowing principals' concerns and the leadership and implementation of strategies…

The Response to Educational Needs Project (RENP) is a compensatory education program which focuses on training teachers to promote student reading achievement. These appendices to a project report provide: a cost analysis of the RENP; information on cost methodology and sample and data collection; cost data; adjusted costs from the Instructional…

A comparison of multisite educational research projects involving qualitative research methods is reported. In phase 1 of the project, telephone interviews with key staff members of 25 projects determined ways in which each project handled important qualitative design and implementation choices. Phase 2 consisted of a more intensive study of 5…

This paper focuses on whether the Response to Educational Needs Project (RENP) has been demonstrated to be a cost effective way of increasing the reading and mathematical achievement scores of students in the fourth, fifth, and eighth grades of the District of Columbia Public Schools. The first section describes the RENP program and its history.…

This monograph critiques the many nonexperimental impact estimation approaches that have been based on external comparison groups. It proposes an approach to evaluating employment and training (E&T) programs that calls for using the group of individuals who apply to a program but then choose not to participate in that program as an…

The purpose of this City Data study was to explore sources of data outside the National Evaluation study of Follow Through to determine the usefulness of such information in the overall assessment. The two major objectives of the study were to judge the representativeness of the Project Follow Through sample and to check on the credibility of…

Research using Social Security data to measure the effects of government manpower training programs on the earnings of participants is discussed. Previous studies employed a longitudinal set of Social Security summary earnings records of over 50,000 individuals who participated in Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) institutional training…

Methodological issues and results described in this paper originated from a Stanford Research Institute (SRI) evaluation of classroom observation data collected in Spring 1973. The main question addressed in this evaluation was whether each of seven Follow Through sponsors had successfully implemented his program in a variety of sites. The steps…

This report presents an analysis of the debt levels and debt burdens of recent college graduates, based on student-reported data from four national surveys taken over the period 1977 to 1986. The major findings of this study were the following: (1) one out of two 1986 college graduates had some undergraduate debt representing an increase from one…

The report evaluates the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) in Missouri by comparing the dietary adequacy and nutrition knowledge of 200 program families representative of urban, small town and rural areas with that of 200 similarly representative non-program families. Data were gathered by personal interviews taken in March,…