This article discusses the importance of conducting an initial needs assessment as part of gifted program development. The paper describes data collection concerning the general student body, gifted population, school district personnel, school and school district, physical setting, economic factors, community, and national and state gifted…

Presents a cyclical proactive model of school administration involving data collection, collaborative definition of student needs, use of student-oriented strategies in development of interventions, and outcome evaluation in terms of intrinsic student changes. Discusses drawbacks to the referral model of problem identification and special…

The Program Status Research Study examined the status of local programs for students with high abilities and reasons given by key personnel for program status. A mail survey to 2,900 local personnel in 19 states (divided into four groups according to economic health and the existence or non-existence of a state mandate to provide services) yielded…

In 1985-1986 the Pima County Adult Education program conducted an adult basic education (ABE) curriculum project that was intended to devise materials for use in determining and remediating content gaps in the district's adult basic education and high school equivalency programs. The needs assessment instrument, which was designed to discover…

This guide explains how to establish a program of supported work that can be used to enable hard-to-employ individuals (including disabled persons, ex-offenders, and rehabilitated drug and alcohol abusers) to obtain and retain jobs. The program described is based on the following five concepts: real job assignments, graduated stress, sympathetic…

This guidebook presents a systems approach to planning, implementing, and evaluating mainstream programs for special needs learners in vocational education. (The guidebook itself models this system.) It is divided into four sections and numerous subsections (components) in this order: (1) Introduction (to mainstreaming, and the approach), (2)…

This study was designed to identify and document programs and practices that demonstrated responsible success with special needs students in the areas of assessment, prevocational training, support services, coping skills, counseling, basic educational skills, and job placement. Data were obtained from more than 121 programs and from 16 visited…