Every year the U.S. Department of Education reports for each state in the country the grade levels, subject areas, and geographic areas that have experienced teacher shortages (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education, 2015). A teacher shortage occurs when the number of teachers available in a specific grade, subject matter…

Many current national and institutional education policies address the issue of raising participation amongst young people and enhancing employability after leaving school or university. What sort of information are these policies built on? This paper compares national information systems from the last three decades across Europe that gather…

Higher education experts tout learning outcomes assessment as a vehicle for program improvement. To this end the authors share a rubric designed explicitly to evaluate the quality of assessment and how it leads to program improvement. The rubric contains six general assessment areas, which are further broken down into 14 elements. Embedded within…

The purpose of this review was to examine research designs in studying knowledge utilization. The results are based on 32 studies of knowledge utilization, and the report describes the various types of research designs and their strengths and weaknesses. Survey research methods are appropriate for dealing with either of two aspects of a…

The article examines: (1) the relationship between group membership and the production of knowledge; (2) comparative versus non-comparative research; and (3) the structure of data interpretation for Afro-Americans versus Euro-Americans. At issue is the lack of blacks involved in the National Research Council's study of blacks. (PS)

The National Research Council's study on the status of black Americans risks enhancing negative policy attitudes towards the black community for the following reasons: (1) its perspective, choice of explanatory variables, and analysis will reflect a majority perspective and conservative viewpoint; (2) it lacks focus; and (3) it is concerned with…

Methods of identifying effective special education practices are analyzed to help practitioners identify and adopt such practices. The contents of this guide include a flowchart for effective practice identification (EPI), an analysis of decision-making steps in this process, and two examples of identification procedures. The decision-making steps…

Study describes actual and ideal linkage roles of four educators trained to link clients with online bibliographic retrieval service, effect of roles on clients' satisfaction with service, conceptualization of role in literature as compared with implementation in field, and implications of findings for educational knowledge dissemination. Twelve…

Techniques for conducting student-attrition studies using the Student-Outcomes Information Service (SOIS) are outlined. General concepts to effectively guide an institutional research effort are discussed, with attention to better defining student attrition and a summary of results of recent research on the reasons why students withdraw from…

A set of 13 key characteristics is presented as a framework for educational evaluation studies: (1) program's stage of development when evaluator is appointed; (2) program's openness to revision; (3) program uniformity from site to site; (4) specificity of program objectives; (5) evaluator's independence; (6) evaluator's orientation to value…

This report provides for Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) prime sponsors who are responsible for labor market information, a set of guidelines to follow for developing an agency-wide plan for the operational use of labor market information. The body of the report outlines step-by-step procedures for creating such a plan. A brief…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is compared to the two studies of the National Educational Longitudinal Studies (NELS) Program--the National Longitudinal Study of the Class of 1972 (resurveyed in 1973, 1974, 1976, and 1979) and the 1980 High School and Beyond study (partially resurveyed and retested in 1982). The third phase…

Information reporting at traditionally black colleges and universities was reviewed, based on the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS) files for 36 institutions. The objective was to determine the quality of the data submitted by seven of these institutions, and to suggest actions for improving the quality of the HEGIS information…

Activities involved in the collection and assembling of data for computer processing from the first followup survey of the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS) are briefly described. Included are an overview of the NLS; the sample design and survey participation; the development of the first followup survey…

The report describes a model, developed by the staff at Edison Community College in Fort Myers, Florida, for collecting and using follow-up information to evaluate and plan occupational programs. After a discussion of the issues to be addressed when evaluating an occupational program, a breakdown of information to be collected in a follow-up study…