The education reform movement has inspired an impressive array of school improvement programs. This article categorizes these intitiatives, summarizes policy directions, explores recent state curriculum guidelines and Northwest trends, and discusses implementation challenges. According to an Education Commission of the States study, most…

In the future, elementary and secondary schools must regard their role as including tasks beyond educating individual students. Schools will have to provide certain functions which were traditionally provided by the home and the community. Based on this premise, there are implications for the functioning of schools and for the kinds of data needed…

The value of statistical research depends on valid comparisons which can usefully influence educational policy. Educational research needs to extend the measures of learning (such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress) through nationally-calibrated absolute measures and through computer-assisted and adaptive testing. Direct sampling…

The Teacher Assessment and Development System (TADS) - Meritorious Teacher Program (MTP) FORM instrument is used in the Dade County Public Schools, Miami, Florida, to evaluate teachers. Its validity for decisions concerning merit pay for master teachers was examined in this study. Specifically, its ability to discriminate between high performing…

This report provides information on how 1985 high school graduates in the Los Angeles Unified School District plan to use their high school education and how they perceive the effectiveness of their high school programs. The data were gathered from 18,598 seniors in their last two weeks of high school (a response rate of 63%). Survey forms were…

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes the official unemployment rate on the first Friday of each month based on a sample survey of 59,500 households called the Current Population Survey. Unemployment data for states and local areas are published monthly by the BLS in cooperation with the state employment security agencies. The primary…

An issues-oriented framework for selecting data to support typical state-level planning analyses is presented. Attention is focused on questions concerning the planning issues, and the general data requirements required to support a given state's analytical questions and decision requirements. State-level planning issues in postsecondary education…

A management information system model was designed to provide data for planning, directing, and evaluating programs for the National Origin Minority Education (NOME) office of the New Hampshire Department of Education. NOME is federally funded to provide training to local school district and community members regarding the educational needs of…

Arguing that retention research requires a sound theoretical framework and that retention planning takes place within a sociopolitical context, this paper presents an overview of the requirements and process of student retention research. Part I examines the role of research in a college's retention effort and establishes the general requirements…

This manual provides a model for tracking the progress of special education and high-risk students who have completed secondary schooling. The manual includes a literature review, procedures for development of a followup system, a bibliography of over 200 followup materials, and a three-part followup instrument. Samples of followup instruments…

The processing of incoming psychological information along the network, or schemata, of self-knowledge was studied to determine the convergent and discriminant validity of the patterns of schemata-specific response latencies. Fifty-three female and 52 male university students completed the Basic Personality Inventory (BPI). BPI scales assess…

Approximately 1200 Danish school children aged 8, 11, and 14 participated in a questionnaire study under the caption, "Why I like to read." Data from Denmark formed part of an international study, in which 12 other countries used the same questionnaire to explore various functions of reading and to compare them over different countries.…

Information is presented on an evaluation design for a federal program, the Podiatric Medicine Training Grant Program. The program supports the clinical training of third- and fourth-year podiatric medical students in underserved areas. Background information is provided on: the supply and distribution of health professionals and podiatrists in…

Written for migrant nurses, this manual is intended to simplify and speed up the process of entering pertinent medical information onto the Migrant Student Record Transfer System (MSRTS) data base. It is designed to be used in conjunction with the indepth technical information in the National MSRTS Health Users Manual and includes page references…

A quasi-experimental design with two experimental groups and one control group was used to evaluate the use of two books in the Quantitative Literacy Series, "Exploring Data" and "Exploring Probability." Group X teachers were those who had attended a workshop on the use of the materials and were using the materials during the…