The Exploring Engagement Fund provides risk capital for arts nonprofits to experiment with innovative ideas about how to engage diverse Californians. In order to understand the variety of Californians engaged in arts experiences, this guide is intended to support current and future Fund grantees in collecting participant information. Exploring…

Excessive college course withdrawals are costly to the student and the institution in terms of time to degree completion, available classroom space, and other resources. Although generally well quantified, detailed analysis of the reasons given by students for course withdrawal is less common. To address this, a text mining analysis was performed…

The NCHEMS Information About Students (IAS) project has as one of its primary goals the development of procedures and materials to assist institutions of postsecondary education in conducting attrition studies. It was the intent of the IAS project to develop and pilot test a questionnaire and accompanying procedures that would help institutions…

A lack of data continues to hinder efforts to cure the problems of poverty areas. This project was designed to determine possible means to gather the needed data, so that program planners could make decisions based on facts rather than intuition. Although this is a case study of an inner-city poverty area of Philadelphia, the need for data and the…

Two recent developments in management information system technology and higher education administration have brought about the need for this study, designed to develop a methodology for revealing a relational model of the data base that administrators are operating from currently or would like to be able to operate from in the future.…

This paper reviews the question of the cost and benefits of data for the analysis of state policy questions, and concludes that in the abstract the question cannot be answered; rather, it must be considered on a continuing basis whenever data is to be collected in the support of baseline studies or special projects. The paper suggests six criteria…

A guide to acquiring information needed about postsecondary education outcomes is presented for campus and state-level officials. Attention is directed to: over 200 outcome measures or indicators; standard definitions of each outcome measure; data sources and procedures to acquire data for each outcome measure; and suggestions concerning the…

Designed to help the correctional administrator meet external demands for information, this detailed analysis of the demand information problem identifies the sources of requests for and the nature of the information required from correctional institutions and discusses the kinds of analytic capabilities required to satisfy most demand information…

The Management Information System (MIS) of the Washington State system of community colleges was designed to be responsive to legislative and district requests for information and to enhance the State Board's capabilities to manage the community college system and integrate its budgeting and planning processes. The MIS consists of seven…

The study summarizes discussions and conclusions of the Regional Workshop on Monitoring and Evaluation of Rural Development Projects in East Africa (Nairobi, Kenya, April 1979), whose purpose was to share lessons learned from field experiences in managing information for rural development. An initial section summarizes information in papers…