This digest addresses the role of evaluation and its basic logic, and provides a description of how the field is structured. In order to reach evaluative conclusions it is usually necessary to establish or identify factual promises and value premises. To obtain the required kind of overall evaluative conclusion, it is typically necessary to…

Studies focusing on the quality of education and equality of educational opportunity in the classroom generally indicated that teachers behave less favorably toward students who (1) come from lower socioeconomic status homes, (2) are lower academic achievers, (3) speak other than standard English, and (4) come from ethnic minority backgrounds such…

Explains that a Middle School Literacy Teacher Expert supports and guides teachers with innovative strategies to help students master basic literacy skills to become lifelong learners. Explains the A.C.T.I.V.E. strategy to encourage students to ask, comment, track down, infer, visualize, and Eureka! (synthesize). (PM)

Discusses the historical development of "hard" and "soft" systems thinking traditions and examines how these traditions have been understood and applied in the field of instructional development. Proposes the need for a synthesis of the two traditions in planning, implementing, and evaluating instructional programs. (AEF)

Synthesizes major findings from research on the magnitude of individual differences in information retrieval (IR) tasks and suggests implications for practice and design of IR systems and interfaces. Topics discussed include indexing consistency, relevance judgments, selection of subject headings, selection of search terms, and search retrievals.…

Integration of knowledge is as critical to understanding as is new knowledge. Specialization requires new forms of integration. Graduate programs should teach future faculty to synthesize, seek new relationships between parts and whole, relate past to future and present, and find patterns of meaning not seen through traditional disciplinary…

After reviewing recent contributions to the field of motor development, suggests a pattern formation or dynamics approach to child development as an alternative to the conventional approaches emphasizing maturation (nativist), specific learning experiences (empiricist), cognitive stages (Piagetian), and strategies of encoding and retrieval…

Recent evidence indicates that certain forms of memory, upon recall, may return to a labile state requiring the synthesis of new proteins in order to preserve or reconsolidate the original memory trace. While the initial consolidation of "instrumental memories" has been shown to require de novo protein synthesis in the nucleus accumbens, it is not…

A new library in San Jose opened on August 1, 2003. This library is the result of a unique collaboration between San Jose State University Library and the San Jose Public Library. The planning for this new library highlighted merging several key areas of operation, including Government Publications. Several years before the two libraries merged,…

Qualitative evaluation and quantitative evaluation are discussed, examining how the perspective of each can and should create a critical debate that encourages inquiry instead of hostility. To achieve the major goal of linking evaluation information to the organization's culture, the evaluator needs to use multiple methods in a responsive,…

The Synergistic Model of Organizational Career Development is a new model of organizational career development that combines the best of career development practice and organizational development into a unified, coherent model. The model has three levels of organization: philosophical, strategic, and practical. Expanding circles are used to…

In an effort to learn more about the cumulative nature of psychological gerontology, an analysis was undertaken of professionally published articles dealing with psychological and related processes and listed in Shock's Current Publications in Gerontology and Geriatrics. Findings indicated a remarkable amount of noncomparable data. (Author)

When students write syntheses in response to a rhetorical task, does the rhetorical nature of the task exert some special influence on the students' composing processes? How do these processes differ? Three case studies, quantitative analyses of papers written by seventeen undergraduates, and a tentative model of a synthesizing process address…

This monograph describes industry at a point in time from the perspective of the faculty in Industrial Education at the University of Minnesota. Section 1 describes the effort to define industry from the perspective of the industrial, business, and economic literature. The remainder of this section is divided into the two components of analysis…

If human service personnel are to serve clients effectively, they must understand the condition of human need and the objects of need which satisfy the condition. While definitions of need vary according to academic discipline, a review of literature in ten academic areas revealed that need as a human condition is based upon the existence of…