For over a decade, the National Science Foundation's Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program has funded researchers and educators to build an understanding of best practices, contexts, and processes contributing to K-12 students' motivation and participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics…

Community college stakeholders are searching with increasing urgency for approaches with the potential to improve the success rates for community college students, particularly those in need of developmental education. "Learning communities," which place cohorts of students together in two or more courses for one semester, are a popular…

This dissertation study employed quantitative methods to investigate the impact of adult questioning styles on children's novel vocabulary acquisition during shared storybook reading. In an effort to examine adult qualitative variations in shared storybook readings, two experiments were conducted to assess the effect of noneliciting questions…

A preliminary report on performance contracting in the Wichita school district. (RY)

Discusses education voucher systems and the OEO experiment. (JF)

Looks at the arguments for and against education vouchers and compares a recent New Hampshire voucher program with an earlier voucher experiment in California. (DN)

The story of the national evaluation of the Follow Through program mirrors the difficulties in trying to evaluate a complex social program that changed its community service orientation to a strategy of planned variation of early childhood programs. (Author/MLF)

This report of the Teacher Aide Program in the Minneapolis, Minn., Public Schools, funded under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is divided into four sections. The first section is "An Overview of the Evaluation of the Teacher Aide Program, Academic Year, 1966-67." The next two sections summarize questionnaire…

This report describes briefly the experimental design and presents the basic contract provisions. The experiment results reveal that performance contracting is no more successful than traditional classroom methods in improving the reading and mathematics skills of poor children. Both control and experimental groups performed equally poorly in…

The Education Voucher Demonstration is a large-scale educational and social intervention that began in the Alum Rock Union Elementary School District, San Jose, California, in September 1972. First funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity, it is now sponsored by the National Institute of Education. This report describes the development of…

This speech explains education voucher programs and responds to criticisms of such programs. The education voucher system is described as one that questions traditional structures and methods while it equalizes opportunities to purchase education, fosters federally funded and controlled alternative school settings and programs, and gives parents…

The evaluation by Abt Associates, Inc., of the Follow Through program, an extension of Head Start designed to improve primary education for disadvantaged children, created a controversy about the program and its assessment, which is discussed in this article. The authors see serious flaws in the evaluation design and interpretation. (MF)

This document contains the abridged proceedings of a workshop on the evaluation of ESEA Title I programs, which are designed to improve education for disadvantaged children. Thirty-nine participants from 24 States attended the workshop. The workshop's 14 papers and four discussion excerpts are organized under four main headings: (1) Title I…

Because it included only public schools and guaranteed both school survival and staff employment rights, the first year of the Alum Rock demonstration (1972-73), as sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity, was not a test of vouchers as defined in theory. The demonstration was known, therefore, as a "transition" voucher model,…