Arizona's First Things First partners with other agencies to create a high-quality, family-centered, comprehensive, and collaborative early childhood system that supports the development, health, and early education of all Arizona's children through age 5, helping ensure they enter kindergarten healthy and ready to succeed. One of First Things…

Federal law requires that all students, including students with disabilities, participate in state assessments used for accountability purposes. It also requires states to assess students in several content areas, including science. Most students with disabilities take the general science assessment with or without accommodations, but a few…

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania plans to develop a new statewide evaluation system for teachers and principals in its public schools by school year 2013-2014. To inform the development of this evaluation system, the Team Pennsylvania Foundation (Team PA) undertook the first phase of the Pennsylvania Teacher and Principal Evaluation…

The Study of Monitoring and Improvement Practices under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) examined how states monitored the implementation of IDEA by local special education and early intervention services programs. State monitoring and improvement practices in 2004-05 and 2006-07 were the focus of the study. Prior to the…

In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Early Learning Initiative (ELI) to improve the school readiness of Washington State's children through three main strategies: (1) development of high-quality, community-wide early learning initiatives in two communities; (2) enhancement of statewide systems that support early…

A field test was conducted to examine the efficiency of a paper-and-pencil television diary for collecting viewer evaluations of public and commerical television programs. Six hundred individuals in Boston, Massachusetts, kept qualitative viewing diaries for one week. The results indicated high and enthusiastic cooperation by the total sample. The…

Application of a multidimensional measure of university research activity, the Research Activity Index (RAI), is described and compared to the more common use of research and development expenditures as a criterion of activity. The RAI incorporates seven expenditure variables, three graduate-student-related variables, and a research library…

At Golden College (California), student writing samples are holistically scored by pairs of judges on a six-point scale. Judges are allowed to use plus and minus figures, thus converting the integer scale to a decimal scale of evaluation. In 1991, 499 writing samples written as part of the placement testing process for students in the Coast…

Six tables provide a breakdown of the answers to a survey responded to by 93 experts in the treatment of psychiatric and behavioral problems in people with mental retardation. Questions address confidence in diagnosing such disorders in this population, methods of evaluation, value of various rating scales, appropriateness of medication for…

First-year veterinary medicine students were surveyed during the first and last week of class to determine if student ratings of instructors are free of bias from generalized attitudes. The tabulated results indicate that the students were not biased by preconceived opinions of instructors. (BH)

This study used data from 992 cases in 16 longitudinal studies of the Early Intervention Research Institute to evaluate five measures of family functioning: (1) Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale-III; (2) Family Support Scale; (3) Family Resources Scale; (4) Parenting Stress Index; and (5) Family Inventory of Life Events.…

This test manual provides information on the Adaptive Behavior Education Scale-Revised (ABES-R), a 25-minute behavior scale designed to evaluate adaptive skills in students with behavioral, learning, and intellectual disabilities, including educationally relevant behavior which may be identified as contributing to more appropriate diagnosis,…

This test manual provides information on the Adaptive Behavior Education Scale-Home Version (ABES), a 25-minute behavior scale designed to evaluate adaptive skills in students with behavioral, learning, and intellectual disabilities, including educationally relevant behavior which may be identified as contributing to more appropriate diagnosis,…