The Roderick MacDougall Center for Case Development and Teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education develops and encourages the use of case materials in the training of educational leaders. The materials are designed primarily for use with those preparing to enter or currently working in K-12 educational institutions. This catalog…

Political and legislative pressures have posed a number of measurement issues and challenges to the development of sound, valid voluntary national tests (VNTs). This paper focuses on what appear to be the most difficult technical issues related to the VNT proposed by President Clinton in 1997. Technical issues refer to psychometric issues, as…

An important feature of recent large-scale performance assessments has been the reporting of pupil and school performance in terms of performance or proficiency categories. When an assessment uses such ordered categories as the primary means of reporting results, the natural way of reporting on the quality of the assessment is through the…

This report is a brief analysis of information from 47 states and non-state jurisdictions on use of the eligibility category, "developmental delay," for children up until their tenth birthday, as permitted under the 1997 Amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Relevant policy issues and concerns are also discussed.…

Six thematic activity booklets are presented for implementing Project EAGLE, an enrichment program for gifted and talented primary-level children. "Animals 3" introduces endangered animals and locates their home areas on maps or globes, using nine learning activities involving science and creative writing. "Magnets" discusses…

Historically, policies and funding guidelines for most federal educational programs have not adequately recognized the diversity of rural schools. A dichotomy of rural and urban, or even a tripartite classification (urban, suburban, and rural), would mask the internal diversity of rural schools. Current efforts to understand the condition of…

The Magazine section of these proceedings contains the following six papers: "An Analysis of 'Magazine Type': Toward an Empirically Based Typology of Magazines and Non-Newspaper Periodicals" (Marcia R. Prior-Miller); "'Redbook': Changes in Attitude and Advice 1965-1990" (Jennifer Harbour); "A Quantitative Analysis of U.S.…

Educational and economic criteria were developed to define a liberal arts college, and this definition was applied to the list of Liberal Arts I and Liberal Arts II colleges in the Carnegie Foundation classification. Educationally, liberal arts colleges were defined by the following criteria: they award the bachelor of arts degree; are…

A study on children's speech is prefaced by an extensive theoretical discussion. An attempt to construct a taxonomy that captured psychologically real, discrete types of communicative acts in mother-child interactions was based on the insight that verbal utterances are social acts that are meaningful in particular social situations. The taxonomy…

At Tallahassee Community College (TCC), a full-time equivalent (FTE) based ratio was used as the basis for comparing the college's staff allocations with those of other community colleges in the state. The development of a statewide personnel database by the Florida State Board of Community Colleges provided the means for investigating this ratio.…

This paper describes the communicative function of language in a monolingual public school kindergarten. The study was based on observations of classroom communication and interviews with the teacher. The paper describes the speech of students and the teacher during different segments of the school day, and presents an analysis of 290 speech acts…

This paper presents a technique for applying the Rule Space Model of cognitive diagnosis (Tatsuoka, 1983) to assessment in a semantically rich domain. Responses of 122 architects to 22 architecture test items developed to assess a range of architectural knowledge were analyzed using Rule Space. Verbal protocol analysis guided the construction of a…

The world faces two converging crises, a lack of biological literacy and a rapid increase in environmental degradation. In order to insure a secure and safe environment for future generations of organisms, all humans must be taught the basic biological and physical processes that sustain life. This project seeks to fill the chasm in the general…

Whether the shaping of test items can itself result in qualitative differences in examinees' comprehension of reading passages was studied using the Pearson-Johnson item classification system. The specific practice studied incorporated, within an item stem line, references that point the examinee to a specific location within a reading passage.…

This report characterizes human problem solving in digital circuit design. Protocols of 11 different designers with varying degrees of training were analyzed by identifying the designers' problem solving strategies and discussing activity patterns that differentiate the designers. These methods are proposed as a tentative basis for assessing…