Roderick Watts and Omar Guessous of Georgia State University conducted exploratory research to investigate the link between math and civic engagement. Their research is based on an evaluation of the Young People's Project (YPP), a national program that recruits, trains, and deploys high school and college Math Literacy Workers for mentoring middle…

Early intervention efforts to promote healthy child development have long been a central feature of social service and public health reforms. Today, prenatal care, well-baby visits, and assessments to detect possible developmental delays are commonplace in most communities. Recently, child abuse prevention advocates have applied a developmental…

This technical report describes a study that was undertaken to compare the content of three mathematics assessments conducted in 2003: the NAEP fourth-and eighth-grade assessments; the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which also assessed mathematics at the fourth-and eighth-grade levels; and the Program for…

This study reports the results of the formative evaluations of two computer-supported tools and the associated strategies for their use. Tools and strategies embedded in web-based courses can increase a supervisor's involvement in helping employees transfer learning onto the workplace. Issues relating to characteristics of the tools and strategies…

Many school districts lack in-place processes for planning and evaluating their programs. In addition, most practicing educators do not have much time to design and carry out program evaluations. This handbook provides a practical guide to program evaluation drawn from action-research principles. The book uses effective, low-cost practices that…

This paper presents a new method to test for grade inflation. Defining grade inflation as the decreasing value of grades in the coin of student achievement, the study avoids the assumption that a rise in mean grade is a necessary condition of grade inflation. The study, which was conducted at a single university, also sought to determine whether…

This report presents the results of a survey of Digital Library Federation members that examined the kinds of assessments they were conducting, what they did with the results, and what worked well or not so well. The first section of the report is an introduction that describes the report structure and summarizes challenges in assessment. The…

This background paper details Head Start, a federally funded program serving preschool age children from low-income families, and focuses on the program's effectiveness and the adequacy of historic federal funding levels. The paper provides an overview of the Head Start Program, describes federal requirements for local programs, and describes Head…

Describes higher education's neglect in dealing with contextually relevant issues in its research about Indian education, such as Indian/White relations. (13 references) (YKH)

Sought to develop a reliable and valid instrument to measure pharmacy students' self-confidence and to determine the effect of selected demographic variables as independent predictors of self-confidence. Found that the instrument had content validity, high internal consistency reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity. Several…

Considers higher education and professional learning and describes a Web-based course focusing on project management skills, including collaboration. Discusses professional knowledge; self-directed learning; social processes of professional learning; integration of learning and assessment; social support for professional skills; cognitive support…

Discusses online assessment as a method to assess student learning in an online environment. Highlights include educators' perspectives; students' perspectives; administrators' perspectives; online assessment tools and systems; and the future of online assessment. (LRW)

Nine articles in this festschrift for Herbert Goldhor explore relatively new and innovative approaches to problem solving in libraries. The articles identify and discuss methods and techniques of applied and evaluative research, consider conceptual and practical issues related to problem solving in libraries, and recognize Goldhor's many…

Investigates differences in marking standard and reliability when experienced teachers carried out assessments of the performance on practical exercises. The results showed that there was no difference between the assessments from the groups containing 5 and 20 students. (Author/YP)

Examines teachers' evaluations by principals over a 10-year period to compare criteria used and determine whether movement toward research-based criteria exists. Finds evaluations to be neither professional nor bureaucratic, but rather serving ritualistic purposes of little help to teachers' professional improvement or to personnel decision…