The politics of program evaluation are discussed from the personal perspective of the Director of the General Accounting Office's Program Evaluation and Methodology Division, which has produced reports for committees of the United States Congress. It is concluded that successful evaluations must be useful to others and must understand the…

The instructional practice of imitation works most effectively as a developmental and remedial instrument within a writing-centered, student-centered pedagogy. In this context, imitation can accelerate natural language acquisition and encourage language competence and control, thus enabling student writers to focus their attention on particular…

This final report presents a description of a 3-year project to develop and implement a model training program (for special education personnel, park and resource management personnel, and parents of disabled children) designed to promote outdoor environmental education for disabled children. The project conducted 22 training workshops (2-5 days)…

This report describes the first of three stages in a study in the domain of problem solving: the definition and explication of schema knowledge. One objective of this research is to understand how schema knowledge is acquired and used in the chosen domain. The focus is on ways in which instruction influences the development of specific knowledge…

The present research addresses the issues of whether there exist certain cognitive skills that facilitate transfer, and whether such skills are themselves transferable across domains. Of primary concern is the instructability of such skills. The Systems Thinking and Curriculum Innovation Project (STACI) is a two-year research project testing the…

Personal narratives were analyzed to determine if a pattern would emerge in the lives of Tucson, Arizona's successful Mexican American adults who had grown up in a traditional barrio without benefit of inherited wealth. Participants in the study were nominated as successful by their peers. Nominees who agreed to participate were given a life…

Some errors in adult black students' writing cannot be analyzed merely within the traditional hierarchy of grammatical rules; a look at sociological factors is germane to an evaluation of students' writing ability or inability. Data for an analysis of black adult students' writing at the syntactic level have shown that problems of clarity might be…

This review of the literature focused on the issue of classroom application of social skills training for handicapped children. First, ten theoretical models are described as representative of the approaches to social skills training in special education: behavioral, humanist, psychological, transactional, neuropsychological, ecological,…

This report summarizes the results of research designed to study the psychometric and technological feasibility of adaptive testing to assess spatial ability. Data was collected from high school students on two types of spatial items: three-dimensional cubes and hidden figure items. The analysis of the three-dimensional cubes focused on the fit of…

The American Chemical Society (ACS) sponsored a conference for educators and chemists to design strategies for implementing the recommendations made in the 1984 ACS publication, Priorities, Partnerships, and Plans: Chemistry Education in the Schools. Participants submitted proposals for mini-grant funding to the ACS Prehigh School Science Program…

This paper examines possible explanations for the fact that evaluation results are rarely used. Most explanatory factors for use of results in decision making mentioned in the literature have been clustered in three categories of variables. They concern: (1) the making of decisions about the practical problem; (2) the way in which evaluation is…

With the advent of the process approach to teaching writing, the use of products or models in the composition classroom has declined, replaced by heuristic exploration of the rhetorical situation, with special emphasis on audience analysis. Some researchers have emphasized the difference between internal audiences and audiences external to the…

A "learning by doing" class was offered by the University of Minnesota to teach needs assessment concepts and approaches. The needs assessment was conducted at the Onan Corporation, which produces industrial engines and other equipment. The class was composed of nine graduate students in industrial or vocational education and was…

The Library Catalog Cost Model described in this report was developed to assist each of the 72 individual libraries participating in the project to compare the costs of alternative future forms of the catalog, emphasizing the costs of implementing AACR 2 (Anglo American Cataloging Rules 2). Inputs characterizing their costs and modes of operation…

Construct validity of a prototype baccalaureate generic problem solving skills test was explored through a structural analysis. The assessment method used three real-life problem situations crossed by six generic skills, namely Decision-Making, Communication, Analysis, Synthesis, Valuing and Execution. There were six written responses for each…