The federal role in higher education has grown over the past two decades, and now a new administration has the opportunity to strengthen policies that support students and their colleges and universities. To help inform these decisions, the Urban Institute convened a bipartisan group of scholars and policy advisers to write a series of memos…

Across the country, state legislatures are turning to evidence-based policymaking to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently and effectively. One example is family support and coaching. In response to research confirming that the early years of childhood affect learning, behavior, and health for a lifetime, many states have invested in…

The community college environment is complex and dynamic, requiring constant monitoring. To ensure that workforce education, a core component of community colleges' missions, remains aligned with colleges' environments, responsive to employers' needs, suited to students' interests and abilities, and current in content and technology, it is…

This executive summary describes highlights from the report, "Building Management Information Systems to Coordinate Citywide Afterschool Programs: A Toolkit for Cities." City-led efforts to build coordinated systems of afterschool programming are an important strategy for improving the health, safety and academic preparedness of children…

The National League of Cities (NLC), through its Institute for Youth, Education and Families, produced this report to help city leaders, senior municipal staff and their local partners answer those questions as they work to strengthen and coordinate services for youth and families, particularly for those cities building comprehensive afterschool…

The rising demand for accountability has had a great influence on the design and use of management information systems. The purposes of accountability, needs assessment, and program evaluation would be well served if a set of indlcators could include information about the outcomes of higher education. (MLW)

The results of the experience of a Technical Assistance Center (TAC) for three months with a system for classifying and recording actual and planned tasks and activities are described and discussed. The area covered by this report includes 15 states in 3 geographic regions. Staff days planned and actually spent and trips planned and spent are…

Ways to monitor staff development programs include: (1) counting the number of participants; (2) obtaining participant reactions to programs; and (3) tracking participants by needs, objectives, and inservice topics. A needs assessment model of staff development focuses on information utilization, program impact, and evaluation approaches. (JN)

Addressed to professionals involved in program evaluation, this working paper covers various aspects of evaluation planning, including the following: planning as a sociotechnical process, steps in evaluation planning, program planning and implementation versus evaluation planning and implementation, the literacy system and its subsystems, and some…

The article proposes that the key to tracking and evaluating the academic progress of college students, particularly at complex institutions, is development of a longitudinal tracking system with flexibility to support a diverse community of users and applications. Considerations for efficient maintenance and effective use of such a system are…

This paper presents a conceptual framework for conducting followup studies as an integral part of an institutional evaluation program. Data obtained from followup studies should become part of an overall information system designed to provide data for institutional decision-making. Such data should be conveniently stored and readily available for…

A planning and evaluation model for management information systems (MIS) at the institutional or system level in higher education is presented. The procedure provides an analytical approach for assessing the effectiveness of an existing information system utilizing a variation of the Business Systems Planning methodology developed by the IBM…

The Delaware Educational Assessment Program publishes annual results from the California Test of Basic Skills by district, school, and grade (1 through 8 and 11). A statewide computer information system was developed to manage the testing program, the massive 10-year longitudinal database, and the information requests received. The Delaware…