Gathering evidence on the outcomes of any professional learning experience can be a challenging and complicated task. It involves consideration of a wide variety of perceptual and contextual issues, some obvious to education leaders and others not. Those who want to succeed in this process may find the following points helpful: (1) Always begin…

For international service-learning to thrive, it must document student learning outcomes that accrue to participants. The approaches to international service-learning assessment must be compelling to a variety of stakeholders. Recent large-scale projects in study abroad learning outcomes assessment--including the Georgia Learning Outcomes of…

Setting up a successful interinstitutional data-sharing project involves commonsense guidelines: be clear about what is wanted, take advantage of what already exists, use appropriate technology, staff adequately, recognize institutional differences, and concentrate on achieving insight rather than precision. (Author/MSE)

Describes three basic approaches to needs assessment--problem identification, problem analysis, and problem verification--and assesses them in terms of their potential utility to users in business and educational settings as measured by their estimated time requirement, accuracy, and cost. Needs assessment data collection resources and techniques…

Vendor-provided electronic resource usage statistics are not currently standardized across vendors. This study investigates the feasibility of using locally collected data to check the reliability of vendor-provided data. Vendor-provided data were compared with local data collected from North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries' Web…

This document contains four papers from a symposium on research issues in human resource development (HRD). "Data for HRD Research and the 1997 Human Performance Practices Survey" (Laurie J. Bassi, George S. Benson), describes two research projects undertaken by American Society for Training and Development (ASTD): publication of the…

Data on which to base interinstitutional comparisons can be obtained directly from institutions or from a variety of secondary and tertiary sources such as national surveys, statistical publications, newsletters, directories, and organizations. Lists of these sources are included. (MSE)

In 1984, a new corpus of spoken Quebecois French (Canada) was added to the existing data. In developing it, half of the native speakers participating in a 1971 study were re-interviewed, providing previously unavailable data on individual language development. The report describes in detail the sociolinguistic methodology used in developing the…

Compares directors' use of Public Library Data Service statistics and Federal-State Cooperative System for Public Library Data statistics to show how directors make use of statistics and to highlight the statistical information that directors find particularly useful. The survey addressed: last time of use; ways of use; frequency of use of…

The University of Maryland System administration has been constructing a relational database that enables comparisons between the more than 500 public four-year colleges and universities in the United States. The data base contains information from nationally available sources, including the National Science Foundation, National Center for…

An overview of college guidebooks examines their origins, development, types, impact on both consumers and colleges, and current trends and future prospects. It is argued that publishers will gain credibility by standardizing data collection and reporting formats and by no longer trying to rank colleges on criteria that change annually and fail to…

This report presents the findings from a study designed: (1) to determine the current availability and utility of student outcome statistics in the nation; and (2) to examine the feasibility and desirability of nationwide institutional reporting of student outcome data. Following an introductory section on the purposes of the report and the…

This report provides comparisons among the social indicator reports of seven countries including Canada, France, Great Britain, Japan, Norway, the United States, and West Germany. The purpose of social indicator research in each country is to provide a means for developing more adequate answers to the questions over present and emerging social…

This report provides the most recent and complete statistics available on student aid in the 1980s. It revises figures presented earlier for the 1980s and, for the first time, gives estimates for academic year 1989-90. The data series upon which the report is based is intended to provide comparable statistics over time for the major providers of…

An international numerical coding structure is presented for classification of data on education according to level category, educational field, and program type. Explanation of the overall system and a guide for its use is followed by a listing of levels, fields, and programs of education in coded order. The various educational program…