How many times have researchers and professional developers approached you or your school with "the answer" to improving literacy achievement? How did it work out? If changes occurred during the engagement with these outside partners, what remained after the project ended? Did such efforts lead to lasting change and improvement in…

There is increasing awareness that domestic violence (DV) and child maltreatment often overlap and that there are significant negative consequences to women and children who are victims in the same families. The present study contains data from a participatory evaluation of a multisite national demonstration project on family violence (the…

A report from the School Choice Demonstration Project examines issues concerning the funding formula used for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). It finds that the program generates a net saving to taxpayers in Wisconsin but imposes a significant fiscal burden on taxpayers in Milwaukee. However, these findings depend significantly on how…

This report focuses on the initial design, implementation and baseline results of the five-year Longitudinal Educational Growth Study (LEGS) of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) being conducted by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP). The LEGS will be the first evaluation of the participant effects of the MPCP using…

The Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project is the most comprehensive effort thus far to ascertain which approaches help welfare recipients and other low-income people stay steadily employed and advance in their jobs. Launched in 1999 and slated to end in 2009, the ERA project encompasses more than a dozen demonstration programs and…

This study empirically investigates the effectiveness of Distributed Leadership Teacher Training (DLT) program on improving student's academic achievement. In addition, it both tests the assumption that the year 1 impacts are stable across calendar years and examines the importance of properly accounting for the fact that the standard error of the…

The final report details achievements and slippages of a model demonstration center which served 46 preschool handicapped children. Documented are milestones in such areas as direct and supplementary services to children (identification, evaluation); parent/family participation (large and small group meetings, individual parent participation);…

Success in competitive employment placement of a demonstration project serving 53 persons with developmental disabilities is associated with three factors: (1) training approach and methodology; (2) program management; and (3) trainee characteristics. (CL)

The report, "The Ready to Teach Program: A Federal Initiative in Support of Online Courses for Teachers", describes the history of the Ready to Teach Program and its role as one of the solutions to the national need to increase the performance of teachers through professional development. The report describes selected findings from the Eisenhower…

The book lists 47 exemplary programs for special education. Programs have been approved by the Joint Dissemination Review Panel of the Department of Education. The book begins with a directory of National Diffusion Network facilitators in 49 states, the District of Columbia, and the Virgin Islands. Program entries include descriptors, a brief…

The study examined a pilot preapprenticeship project which sought to have a school system and a union with the Joint Carpentry Apprenticeship Committee, work with the Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training to develop a training course for high school students which would enable them to enter apprenticeship at an advance stage while at the same time…

To be effective in changing career/vocational education practices for handicapped students, inservice education should be targeted to school teams, involve participatory planning processes, acquire administrative support, use trainers as information givers and consultants, and capitalize on existing services. Successful approaches in New York…

The rationale and structure of a three-year model center program for severely handicapped children are discussed. Child progress data are given and a regression analysis conducted to isolate possible predictors of improvement is described. (Author/CL)

Government and public focus on accountability for program outcomes, combined with practical and ethical constraints on experimental designs, make nonexperimental studies of social programs an increasingly common approach to producing information on program performance. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of alternative nonexperimental…

Accessing Curriculum through Technology Tools (ACTTT), a model development project, was developed and tested by staff of the Center for Best Practices in Early Childhood (the Center), a research and development unit within the College of Education and Human Services at Western Illinois University. The major goal of ACTTT was to develop,…