This monograph provides definitions, guidelines, and recommended practices for assessing and improving institutions of higher education in South Carolina which are congruent with the accreditation standards and criteria of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. The first section defines key terms and states that overall institutional…

Although home study institutions rarely change hands, periodic internal valuations of the financial worth of home study schools can be instructive for school owners. The first step is to determine the school's position in the context of the education field. This can be accomplished by asking 10 questions that a potential buyer of the school might…

This digest discusses the use of benchmarking as a strategy for assessing and improving efficiency and productivity of administrative processes and instructional models in colleges and universities. Benchmarking, developed by the Xerox Corporation in the 1980s, is defined as an ongoing, systematic process for measuring and comparing the work…

Case studies of focus groups as a useful educational research strategy for evaluating noninstructional interventions are described. Focus groups were used to evaluate the effectiveness of programs in the following Virginia school settings: (1) peer counseling programs in 4 high schools with 49 student counselors; (2) gifted programs in 7…

This paper describes distance legal education as conducted by the Open University of Sri Lanka. The paper opens with a description of legal education in Sri Lanka which began in the period of British colonial rule. Also described are more recent efforts to make legal education available to a larger segment of the population culminating in the…

This paper reports on a whole-school staff development program, field-tested and developed by the Appalachia Educational Laboratory, Inc. The program called QUILT (Questioning and Understanding To Improve Learning and Thinking) was designed to improve the questioning skills of classroom teachers by helping them individually and with colleagues.…

This digest, based on a full report of the same title, provides an examination of the improvement of college teaching and argues for the central involvement of faculty themselves in collaborative peer review and looks at some central issues and challenges to implementation. Since summative evaluation involved in tenure and promotion decisions…

This literature review and evaluation "tool kit" provides a summary of the research literature about the evaluation of large-scale intervention policies like the Blueprint for the Future program of the Scarborough (Ontario, Canada) Board of Education. This report is intended to assist in creating a realistic plan for the Blueprint…

Whatever the cause of present-day problems in American education, there is little doubt that proposals for national curricula and examinations are a response to widely-held perceptions of serious problems in the schools. Although national examinations have been proposed, there has been little consideration of their purposes and structures. The…

Basic issues in workplace education evaluation can be structured into five discussion questions. The first is who wants to know what information for what purpose. The "who" constitutes the program's stakeholders both at and beyond the program level. Further inquiry is then needed to determine what kind of information these stakeholders typically…

Leaders in business and industry are demanding workers who not only can read and write but can think creatively and critically and solve problems. Federal- and state-funded programs and volunteer organizations are involved with adult literacy. Increasingly, corporations are funding adult literacy projects. Adults read for different reasons than…

A workshop designed to present teachers and administrators with information on assessment issues and instruments related to developmentally appropriate practices in early childhood classrooms is presented in this guide for trainers. The workshop is process-oriented, meaning that participants will be engaged in activities that require them to…

The suggestions offered in this paper are based on the experiences of two scientific researchers of how evaluations undertaken in a competitive arena, in which true experimental designs are not viable, can be designed in such a way that meaningful comparative data can be examined. Case studies of the Science and Engineering Research Semester and…

This guide presents principles for the effective integration of young children with disabilities into regular classrooms in Massachusetts. Planning for integration is discussed in terms of the responsibilities of the integration team (using either a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary model), the role of the family, assessment of children's…

This document presents a summary of follow-up evaluation studies of basic and advanced education graduates, conducted by the Office of Educational Research and Services at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) over the last few years. (The university's evaluative follow-up endeavors have been closely tied to a needs assessment model, and a major…