It is often difficult and costly to obtain individual-level student achievement data, yet, researchers are frequently reluctant to use school-level achievement data that are widely available from state websites. We argue that public-use aggregate school-level achievement data are, in fact, sufficient to address a wide range of evaluation questions…

Many current national and institutional education policies address the issue of raising participation amongst young people and enhancing employability after leaving school or university. What sort of information are these policies built on? This paper compares national information systems from the last three decades across Europe that gather…

The role of contextual information in the generation of early hypotheses during the clinical interview was studied with expert and novice medical diagnosticians: 18 experienced family physicians versus 5 new physicians and 12 final-year medical students. The 18 experts and 17 novices were presented with 32 short case histories each presented on…

Part 1 of a two-part series, this volume presents three separate policy studies done using a contextual research, development, and innovation (RD & I) analysis framework developed by the authors. The studies are intended to demonstrate the requirements and possibilities for policy analysis in the RD & I arena and the utility of the…

This paper reports the results emanating from the Dissemination, Utilization, and Assessment (DUA) project. Designed to shed light on factors that might facilitate or impede more effective and extensive use of audiovisual materials in higher education, this 3-year project focused on the use of the audiovisual materials produced by Annenberg/CPB.…

Uses Transfer Consortium data to track the academic path of a transfer cohort from Macomb Community College (MCC) in Michigan to five local four-year institutions. Finds that most transfers from a community college did not earn an associate's degree and that the average ASSET scores of the cohort are higher than the mean score for everyone tested…

Part 2 of a two-part series, this volume presents five separate policy studies done using a contextual research, development, and innovation (RD & I) analysis framework developed by the authors. The studies are intended to demonstrate the requirements and possibilities for policy analysis in the RD & I arena and the utility of the…

This document summarizes proceedings of a meeting held in September 1995. The purpose of the meeting was to gather educators and policymakers in order to establish criteria concerning links between educational research and decision making. Twenty participants from the following countries attended: Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Botswana, Brazil,…

Reports on a study that explored the information locating and use activities, motivation, and learning patterns of children and adults using either a print or multimedia resource to complete an independent research task. Comparisons are presented between activities of print users and multimedia users, motivation in children and adults, and the…

This document reports on a project undertaken to determine the feasibility of a periodic national survey of a sample of U.S. school districts to obtain information on the performance of the existing dissemination and utilization network for educational innovations. All the cases in this volume were originally identified from a national survey of…

In this study, an examination of the determinants and consequences of occupational knowledge is carried out using data collected from the National Longitudinal Survey of 5,159 young women. The study closely parallels a 1975 study by Parnes and Kohen utilizing information collected from about 5,000 young men. The significance of various background…

This document reports on the content model of the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), which is intended to replace the "Dictionary of Occupational Titles." The following chapters are included: "Introduction" (Michael D. Mumford and Norman G. Peterson); "Content Model" (Michael D. Mumford and Norman G. Peterson);…