Choosing a school for a child can be a rewarding, but difficult task for parents. A recent survey reported that parents often feel confused by the information available to them as part of the school choice process. This can be exacerbated by limited time and resources to devote to the process--constraints that can particularly affect low-income…

More than ever, school districts and other organizations need to provide parents with information about school quality and their school choices. Across the country school choice is expanding in ways that provide opportunities--and challenges--for parents to select the schools that best fit their children's needs. The federal Every Student Succeeds…

School choice is expanding, providing both opportunities and challenges for parents seeking information about schools that best fit their children's needs. Federal law now calls for every school to have "understandable" and "user-friendly" report cards. However, there is little evidence-based guidance to help design effective…

The AEM Navigator facilitates the process of decision-making around accessible formats of educational materials for individual students. It assists teams in making informed, accurate, and multi-step decisions related to determining a student's need for accessible formats, selecting the format(s) needed, acquiring materials, and determining the…

Technology continues to radically change how we create and consume information. Today, news, reports, and other material are often delivered quickly through pictures, colors, or other eye-catching visual elements. Words still matter, but they may be tweeted, viewed on a smartphone, or placed in a call-out box in a report. The design of these items…

Posting a report on the web or sending out a press release used to be all that was needed to help get the word out about one's research findings. But times have changed. Today, effective dissemination depends on getting the right message to the right people at the right time in the right form. To break through the clutter, researchers need…

PowerPoint presentations, Excel documents, Web pages, and videos posted on federal websites must meet the requirements of the 1998 amendment to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Doing so ensures that these materials are accessible to a wide range of people with disabilities, including visual, auditory, sensory, and motor impairments. These…

Offers ideas on ways to increase readership of the editorial pages in college newspapers, including the masthead, using a variety of design elements, and making it truly a students' newspaper by running plenty of letters to the editor. (SR)

Focuses on how typography and color complement and differ from each other in signaling an underlying content structure; the synergism between typography, color, and page layout (use of white space) that aids audience understanding and use; and the characteristics of typography and of color that are most important in these contexts. (SR)

Offers guidelines to help novice hypertext designers construct interfaces that are usable. Discusses windows versus frames, which interaction style to use, how to display text and buttons effectively, and how to use color and tables, diagrams, and animation effectively. (SR)

Offers suggestions for writing trip reports that communicate the usefulness of the trip. (JAD)

Discusses how to use sidebar stories to cut down very long stories. Presents several examples of effective sidebars from school newspapers. (RS)

Presents a list of 23 questions for high school newspaper advisors concerning publication policies, editorials, source anonymity, page design, and other issues relating to overall credibility. (RS)

Considers the confusion of over 20 different kinds of graphics programs. Briefly distinguishes between some of the more popular graphics formats (Photoshop, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PICT, and EPS), and describes the benefits and disadvantages of each in the context of journalism education. (SC)

This is a simple how-to-do it manual intended to help projects that wish to produce print materials. It highlights the stages involved in producing print materials, giving an overview of the steps required and offering hints on different approaches to the various processes. The manual begins with the comprehensive layout (dummy) stage and proceeds…