Widespread educational reform will occur only if encouraged by a coherent policy environment that explicitly supports fundamental change and unleashes the imagination and energy of students, teachers, parents, and community leaders. To prepare students well for the 21st century, our education system requires an interdisciplinary environment, a…

A framework is presented for evaluating family centers in the context of the community environment. The family centers will be created in a variety of communities and under varying auspices. Several will be selected as prototype centers and, as such, will need more elaborate evaluation plans than the others. Prototype centers will need to evaluate…

This chapter, from a guide for designing, implementing, and evaluating instruction and services for students with disabilities, acquaints the education administrator with the what, why, and how of interagency collaboration. System-level interagency collaboration involves joint planning, joint implementation, and joint evaluation between…

Research that identifies factors that facilitate information processing and enhance performance without reducing group confidence and decision satisfaction may influence future development of groupwork systems. This paper contains a review of the literature on cognitive and motivational issues in both group decision-making and learning contexts…

This report from a study group on long-term mental illness (LTMI) examines three components of the vocational rehabilitation process (the client, the counselor, and the programs) and the systems through which the three components interact. The first chapter discusses the history and evolution of the vocational rehabilitation (VR) and mental health…

Latin American countries have a long history in the application of educational technology to the improvement of teacher education. Even though past innovations, such as the Multinational Project on Educational Technology have been successful, there are still problems with the quality of teacher education. Apparently, processes have been improved…

Research in organizational development and ecological psychology has demonstrated the importance of viewing organizations from a systems perspective. Organizational innovations are planned, designed, and implemented in increasingly complex and dynamic ecosystems. This paper presents a model of organizational change which was developed using a…

Jessica Yood argues that Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives can help us better understand how the academy can act in the information age. Drawing on her observations of a newly emerging WAC program, she offers "an alternative approach to the traditional lens we use to look at disciplines or culture" and suggests that we…

Introduction: Proposes a systemic approach to Public Sector Information (PSI), defined as comprising entities in four categories--citizens, businesses, policymakers and administrations. This system also comprises four categories of information--on citizenship, economic and social development, policy and administration. Methods: A selective…

The use of systems analysis may help child developmental specialists improve the success rates of toilet training programs with developmentally disabled children. Such a systems analysis includes the sociocultural, family, and/or individual ecosystems of the individual. Two detailed case studies of mentally retarded elementary school age children…

The first phase of the process of developing a plan to promote increased use of educational technology by the instructors and students of the U.S. Navy's Surface Warfare Officers School (SWOS) in Newport, Rhode Island, began with a needs assessment which focused on the mission and organization of the school; the SWOS curriculum and the teaching…

Systems theory and its application to educational administration are discussed in this paper. An extensive literature review concludes that systems analyses are based on the concept of interdependence and on the assumption that the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts. Applications to educational administration include model building,…

In 1981 four supervisors at a chemical company in Great Britain were each fined 100 pounds under the country's 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act after a fifth supervisor was injured because of a faulty interlock guard. The supervisors were convicted because they had all known about but had done nothing to rectify the potential safety hazard. The…

There are many issues to consider in the training of psychology graduate students in a family institute setting. Training in family institute settings offers both unique opportunities and some liabilities. Advantages to training in this type of setting include: (1) the ability to fully teach a model by laying a theoretical groundwork, presenting a…

For more than 80 years, jobs in the United States have been designed by people for others. For most of these years, the experts in job design have placed the production technology above the job holder in importance. Since the 1950s, many jobs have been redesigned around new, computer-based technology. Often, the net effect has been to make those…