This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…

Scientists, educators, and parents of teens have long recognized the potency of peer influences on children and youth, but until recently, questions of how and why adolescents emulate their peers were largely overlooked. This book presents a framework for understanding the processes by which peers shape each other's attitudes and behavior, and…

The making of a decision implies a choice between competing alternative solutions. In a decision-making context including multiple criteria, the criteria (or their related variables) are placed in relation to each other. This provides a comparison to some fixed point or origin, reducing the problem to one which can be solved by optimization as in…

The paper explores the question of why young people go on from school to higher education in Australia, viewing the decision as a function of individual attributes and situational characteristics. A theory to explain young people's decisions is developed, proposing that young people choose to go because they find higher education to be both…

A broad conceptual framework is presented as a tool to guide researchers toward identification and development of variables in policy implementation studies. Concepts for developing variables to measure the "amount" of implementation and variables to identify the aspects of policy that need to be incorporated in a study are discussed.…

A developmental neuropsychological model is presented to address critical factors critical to the functional outcome in children with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. In the model, which is derived from work at the Boston Children's Hospital Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) program, neuropsychological outcomes are determined…

Using data describing entry into preschool among children with special needs, this paper introduces the fundamental statistical quantities of event occurrence--hazard and survivor functions. The paper discusses construction of formal statistical models of event occurrence over time, predictors that can be included in hazard models, and importance…

Reviews the different types of models that can be used in groundwater modeling. Discusses the flow and contaminant transport models in the saturated zone, flow and contaminant transport in variably saturated flow regime, vapor transport, biotransformation models, multiphase models, optimization algorithms, and potentials pitfalls of using these…

This manual provides resource tools and strategies to enhance the suicide prevention capabilities of health professionals and the health care setting in which care is provided. In the first section, terms are defined and the suicide prevention triangle model is described. Applications of the model and good practices for suicide prevention in any…

This manual is designed to serve as a comprehensive guide for utilizing 20/20 analysis, an instructional planning approach that aims to overcome the disjointedness of current, narrowly formed categorical programs for educating marginal students. The authors explain that 20/20 analysis is a key element in developing an integrated service delivery…

This study describes the Michigan special education work force (as of 1988-89) with regard to six issues, one primary and five supplemental, having to do with the need for and supply of special educators and attempts to predict future personnel needs. The primary issue concerns the factors that will affect the teacher supply and demand in the near…