District Awards for Teacher Excellence (D.A.T.E.) is a state-funded program in Texas that provides grants to districts for the implementation of locally-designed performance pay plans. All districts in the state are eligible to receive grants, but participation is voluntary. As D.A.T.E. continues in its second year of operation with approximately…

The process involved in planning, developing, and building a resources file is described in the context of a state education agency. The key decision points which confront the dissemination director are described, i.e., determining the client, the client's resource needs, and the availability of already existing resources. The steps involved in…

There is a continuing need in evaluation research for the establishment of a relationship between evaluation findings and decision making. A method is proposed for a particular situation: annual funding decisions for projects in a large grant program in vocational education. Outcome and predictive impact variables were ranked by three groups of…

Designed to guide and structure the needs assessment of Pennsylvania children with special health care needs, this document describes six specific steps in planning and conducting a needs assessment. The steps include: (1) stating the goals of the needs assessment, including fulfilling legislative mandates, identifying geographical areas that have…

This report discusses the outcomes of a study that investigated the effects of modifications to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 1996 assessment designed to encourage the participation of more students with disabilities. Modifications included revising the inclusion criteria with the intention of making them clearer, more…

Twenty-six papers on evaluation, which were presented at the 1971 American Educational Research Association Convention, are summarized. The papers range from a general overview of evaluation concepts to quite specific evaluative applications. A group of reports concerning state assessment efforts in Florida and Michigan is given separate…

The seven issues discussed represent a consolidation of the larger number of urgent educational problems that faced the States in 1966, as well as those identified by the Steering Committee of the Education Commission of the States at a meeting in December of that year. The issues were first assigned as paper discussion topics, the writing of…

Within a program of training system evaluation, optimal training system development cannot occur without evaluation development, and evaluation cannot be very effective in the absence of an optimal approach to training system development. Therefore, the goal of the Community Affairs Training Evaluation (CATE) project was to develop a set of…