The Montana School Accreditation Standards (10.55.603, ARM) require schools to do follow-up studies of graduates and students no longer in attendance. This report provides information on students who graduated or dropped out of Montana public, state-funded and nonpublic, accredited schools during the 2004-05 school year. Students who drop out of…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to identify and define the existing students' statistical types by their attitudes towards a computer (emotional-motivational relationship with a computer) and to disclose the connection with factual computer literacy using multidimensional statistical methods. Methodology: The empirical-experimental part of…

Written for all teachers of young children, this book illustrates activities that promote early mathematics development for children ages three to five and "showcases" mathematics for the young child. The thirty-five activities in this book are distributed into five content areas: number and operations, geometry, algebra, measurement, and data…

NASA CONNECT is a research and standards-based annual series of integrated mathematics, science, and technology instructional distance learning programs for students in grades 6-8. This program has three components: (1) a 30-minute television broadcast which can be viewed live or taped for later use; (2) a companion educator's guide including a…

The School Improvement Specialist Project prepared seven modules. School improvement specialists, as defined by the Appalachia Educational Laboratory at Edvantia, are change agents who work with schools to help them improve in the following areas so as to increase student achievement. These modules are intended to provide training materials for…

During the 2002-2003 academic year, six roundtables were held to explore uses of the data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) for improvement of student learning. This paper describes the roundtable discussion held in October 2002 at the Professional Organizational Development conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Thirteen faculty…

This report explains using data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) to evaluate undergraduate persistence. A recent study (A. Astin and I. Oseguera) has found that two-thirds of the variation among institutions in degree completion rates is attributable to differences in their entering classes rather than to differences in…

This book presents ways that preservice and inservice teachers can conduct research in their classrooms, showing how they can carefully and systematically ask and answer their own questions about learning. Seven chapters focus on: (1) "Try to Love the Questions Themselves: Finding and Framing a Research Question"; (2) "Form and Function: The…

In October 2003, NCES asked the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) and the Education Statistics Services Institute (ESSI) to convene a task force of measurement and policy experts to examine current high school graduation, completion, and dropout indicators (GCD) and recommend improvements in the measures. The Task Force was asked…

This doctoral dissertation investigated literacy and educational achievement among the adult Mexican origin population in the United States by means of a secondary data analysis of the 1979 National Chicano Survey (NCS). The unique contribution of this study is its focus on biliteracy (i.e., literacy across English and Spanish). Literacy…

This needs assessment investigated current and optimal levels of information literacy among faculty members at South Georgia College (SGC). Each faculty member was asked to complete a 10-question closed-ended survey to determine the overall information literacy of SGC's faculty based upon qualitative analysis. Then, six faculty members, two from…

This report summarizes the problems schools are encountering as they try to use data to gauge the effectiveness of standards-based education, accountability efforts, and school reform. It provides an overview of the education market, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of available software, and describes systems used by 19 states. The article…

Is Ohio losing its best and brightest minds? That's what is often implied by some well-publicized data on college graduates who move to other states after graduation. But what do these data actually tell us? This Commentary shows that they do not paint a complete picture of the emerging class of graduates, much less the state's workforce. States…

Traditional word problems have not fulfilled the goal of mathematical sense-making for many students. Some studies have shown that authentic contexts, such as model-eliciting tasks, have the potential to engage students in making sense of realistic situations. However, there has been little research on the kinds of knowledge needed by teachers to…

This paper explores the unique curriculum design issues involved with the integration of qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) in online instruction of qualitative research. The Qualitative Research III--Analysis course was designed for graduate students and offered in a blended online format using the NVivo[R] software program and the…