The Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) will establish technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the survey design and implementation processes of PIAAC yield high-quality and internationally comparable data. This document provides a revised version of the technical standards and guidelines originally…

Recent calls for high standards and hard content for all students have brought a growing interest in Opportunity-To-Learn (OTL) measures. OTL indicators provide valuable information for anyone interested in knowing what instruction is like, whether it is equitably distributed, and whether it is improving over time. This paper describes an effort…

The "2004/06 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:04/06)" is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to respond to the need for a national, comprehensive database concerning issues students may face in enrollment, persistence, progress, and attainment in postsecondary education and in consequent early rates of…

Many organizations and agencies collect data related to postsecondary education. To improve the coordination of data definitions and surveys, guidelines have been prepared to define the best survey practices for data collectors and data providers. The first section of this document, "Best Practices for Data Collectors," covers the…

This paper sketches seven activities that the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) should pay attention to over the next few years as it attempts to provide accurate and complete data on the elementary and secondary education system of the United States. The activities are: (1) act aggressively to meet the major problems of data…

This policy guide argues the need for improved indicators of student coursework, illustrates the information that different types of measures convey, outlines the key choices that need to be made about data collection, and suggests ways in which states might develop more valid and useful indicators of student coursework. In its broadest form,…

This report describes the methods and procedures used for the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study: 1996-2001 (BPS:1996/2001). These students, who started their postsecondary education during the 1995-96 academic year, were first interviewed in 1996 as part of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:96). A follow-up…