Background: Often, a principal's responsibilities include making decisions about the appropriateness of educational programmes to adopt in their school. Recommendations about programmes can be conflicting; so, a principal may need to search for evidence to inform their decision. Purpose: The purpose of this small-scale study was to clarify how…

Presents an approach to using online sources of information for competitor intelligence (i.e., monitoring industry and tracking activities of competitors); identifies principal sources; and suggests some ways of making use of online databases. Types and sources of information and sources and database charts are appended. Eight references are…

To better understand the development of noncompensatory strategy use for decisions involving social and nonsocial objects, a decision board technique was used to trace the information acquisition process of 88 second-, fifth-, and eighth-graders. Findings indicated that second-graders searched the decision board (a matrix with 24 squares of hidden…

Defines and discusses competitive intelligence for business decision making and suggests the use of online databases to start looking for relevant information. The best databases to use are described, designing the search strategy is explained, reviewing and editing results are discussed, and the presentation of results is considered. (LRW)

A comparative analysis of two decision making strategies was conducted. One strategy compared alternatives on their best attributes for "the best payoff," while the other strategy called for accepting the first alternative that achieved all minimum cutoff values for all attributes. The subjects, 211 college students, selected a mayoral preference…

Explores types of information which might be used in making decisions about the quality of education. Presents methods by which this information may be utilized to make decisions at various levels in the educational enterprise. Urges that quantitative techniques for gathering information be linked with decisions concerning the quality of…

Conducts a scenario-based usability test with 10 data analysts using visual querying (visually analyzing data with interactive graphics). Details a range of difficulties found in visual selection that, at times, gave rise to inaccurate selections, invalid conclusions, and misguided decisions. Argues that support for visual selection must be built…

Data on the characteristics, information needs, and information dissemination patterns of actual and potential users of educational information were gathered through field interviews with persons representing a variety of educational roles and geographical locations (Vol. I) as well as through a nationwide mail questionnaire survey (Vol. II).…