The role of the professional evaluator within a school district is essentially to provide data for use in informed decision making. In School District 4J in Eugene, Oregon, this role involves performing tasks in three basic categories: (1) maintaining and interpreting ongoing databases, (2) finding and analyzing information to answer specific…

The Migrant Student Record Transfer System (MSRTS) is a nationwide computer-based communications network originally designed to transfer the health and educational records of migrant workers' children. This report assesses MSRTS data from September 1984 through June 1986 to determine the potential utility of such data for national studies of the…

A study was conducted of the International Information Service in Physics, Electrotechnology, Computers, and Control (INSPEC) selective dissemination of information (SDI) user profile generation. Five degrees of user involvement in the generation of profiles were investigated ranging from having the user provide only a statement of subject…

This report examines federal, state, and local databases containing information on migrant workers and their children, identifies their common characteristics, and assesses their potential utility to inform educational policy analysis. General criteria used to evaluate each database's strengths and weaknesses include standardization, reliability,…

This document, one part of a project to train personnel for educational development and evaluation, describes a management system for individualized student instruction. Certain objectives are set from which management activities and provisions for data storage and use are inferred. The result is a comprehensive flowchart of the instructional…

One of a series of sixteen knowledge transformation papers, this paper deals with the nature and extent of use of evaluative data by administrators in vocational education. First, the following conditions which govern the use of the data are described: availability, reliability, credibility, utility, and consistency. Since the legitimacy of most…