There are increasing demands for higher levels of data assurance in higher education. This paper explores some of the drivers for this trend, and then explains what stakeholders mean by the concept of data assurance, since this has not been well defined previously. The paper captures insights from existing literature, stakeholders, auditors, and…

The Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) is sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education and is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. TFS is a follow-up survey of selected elementary and secondary school teachers who participated in the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). SASS is the…

Quality assurance is defined and some of the tools of the quality assurance analyst and how they are being used at the Division of Administrative Programming Services at Clemson University are described. Customer involvement and training of the data processing staff to ensure quality products are discussed. (Author/MLW)

Holds that database producers and online system vendors have failed to maintain sufficient quality control over their products, and that online searchers should voice their complaints about file documentation errors, indexing inconsistencies, and incorrect data entries. (FM)

This report presents the results of an audit by the Office of the Inspector General to determine whether the Department of Education's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) provided sufficient oversight of graduation and dropout rates submitted by states in their Consolidated State Performance Reports to ensure the rates were…

The ability of operating departments of an institution to mechanically gather, summarize, and report "local" data is discussed. Problems are outlined that arise when departments have the ability to produce data and do so with rigorous quality control by the institution's central information management organization. (MLW)

Reports the findings of a study which examined the question of submitting error reports to OCLC for the purpose of database quality control, and describes ENHANCE, a program that would provide online error correction capability for member libraries. Eight references are cited. (FM)

Applying to air quality data, procedures are presented for site characterization, method identification, data validation, and data summarization that are being established by the Environmental Protection Agency for the National Aerometric Data Bank. Topics review screening criteria, atypical results (data outliers), data accuracy and precision,…

An effort to enhance quality and efficiency at the University of Florida was designed to produce quick results without involving many employees and focused on the accounts payable department. Flowcharting identified inefficiencies and pinpointed opportunities for improvement in labor-intensive processes, mailings, check registers, reports,…

The problem of quality service assurance in a computer networking environment is addressed. In the absence of any direct, well-defined, quantitative measure of service quality and reliability, error collection and analysis is the only basis for service quality control. Therefore, mechanisms are described which facilitate reporting of operational…

Includes "Learning by the Numbers" (Oliver); "Industrial Control through Electronics" (Cowen, Haynie); "Data Control with a PC" (Zoghi, Lorenzo); "Portfolio Assessment" (Wolansky); and "Quality in the Classroom: Evaluating Individuals in Group Projects" (McCrea). (SK)

Initial efforts to collect data on the impact of Elementary Secondary Education Act Title I programs began in Pennsylvania in 1972. Due to the frequent turnover of local education agency (LEA) staff responsible for Title I impact reports and the fact that a study of the accuracy of reported scores revealed that some sort of errors appeared in…

The data entry quality control procedures in discrete data entry tasks in the National Longitudinal Study (NLS) Fourth Follow-Up Survey are examined. Direct data entry terminals were used to key survey questionnaire item responses, telephone interview corrections, respondent background information and supplemental questionnaire responses into…

Papers on local area networks (LANs), modelling techniques, software improvement, capacity planning, software engineering, microcomputers and end user computing, cost accounting and chargeback, configuration and performance management, and benchmarking presented at this conference include: (1) "Theoretical Performance Analysis of Virtual…

The New York City Public School System has mandated an Integrated Student Data System (ISDS). This integrated system will include data already maintained in independent computerized files, as well as data that have not been computerized in any systematic way. This paper explores general issues about data accuracy for a system that covers all the…