Information is provided on the characteristics of students attending the City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) and their general education and liberal arts knowledge. The first sections of the report provide information on the development and administration of the General Academic Assessment (GAA), an instrument containing representative items in the…

Summarizing the results of informal discussions among the commissions and standing committees of the National Council of Teachers of English, this paper outlines key educational trends and issues in areas of the English language arts. Various sections of the paper contain information from the commissions on English language, literature,…

Ideas and activities for helping children attain success in school, in friendships and in sports are presented in this handbook for parents. The areas covered are: (1) developing a winning attitude; (2) increasing self-confidence; (3) improving reading skills; (4) gaining good study habits; (5) improving test-taking skills; (6) doing homework; (7)…

Based on a survey of high school programs and courses in the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD), this articulated program is designed to prepare students for entry-level employment in the air conditioning and refrigeration industry, including residential and commercial air conditioning and commercial refrigeration. The skills and…

The articles in this collection address basic questions about college reading theory, curriculum, and assessment. Major article titles and authors are as follows: (1) "Reading Achievement," by Anthony R. Petrosky; (2) "Excerpt from 'A Proposal for Reading Stages'," by Jeanne S. Chall; (3) "Finding a Sense of Wonder in Language and Literacy," by…

This report provides Minnesota legislators with background information on establishing state educational standards and periodic testing to measure student progress. Scientific management, the accountability movement, and the basic education movement were educational trends of the 1970's providing pressure on states to set standards to improve…

A process policy model that contains a broad range of categories and matrices that can be used to generate questions is used to analyze the development and application of selected segments of the South Carolina Educator Improvement Act. This act is a comprehensive legislative endeavor to upgrade public education in South Carolina. This paper…

The regular certification of arts and science graduates who have not completed the necessary professional education courses has become state policy recently in several states and others are considering it. These four studies provide data on two research questions related to this policy: (1) What, if any, differences in scores on teacher…

The job analysis procedures used in the development of the Illinois Certification Testing System are described. The degree of congruence between job analysis ratings provided by public school educators (PSEs) and teacher educators (TEs) who completed the job analysis surveys is examined. National Evaluation Systems, Inc., and the Illinois State…

Changes in the population of children served as educable mentally retarded (EMR) in the public schools are examined. The term "new" refers to children currently classified as EMR, in contrast to children classified as EMR in the late 1960s, predating court actions challenging the criteria for EMR eligibility. "New" EMRs have an IQ of 50-75, while…

This report presents results from three research studies that were designed to explore both the definition and the structure of the adaptive behavior construct. The first study investigated the structure of adaptive behavior as a function of age, developmental level, and type of handicap through an exploratory factor analysis of both the…

The Writing Center at Troy State University (Troy, Alabama), is described in this report. Currently in its seventh year of operation, the Center functions under the philosophy that any student can be successful given the appropriate method of instruction and sufficient time. It provides a multiplicity of services including one-to-one tutorials,…

In 1988, a study was conducted to examine student assessment and related remedial/developmental programs in Michigan's 29 community colleges. Administrators or instructors with direct responsibility for developmental education programs were surveyed regarding the existence of an institutional definition of and mission statement for remedial…

Previous research has failed to support the widely held assumption that the academic difficulties experienced by many minority and low socioeconomic status youth are due to their "outsider" standing vis-a-vis the middle class culture thought to govern the social relations of schooling. This analysis suggests that this proposition errs in…

This paper reports on several generic evaluation methods used by the evaluation office of the Curriculum Research and Development Group of the University of Hawaii (EO-CRDG). Scrivens's (generic) checklist approach was taken one step further by developing generic data collection instruments to be used with any evaluation method: (1) a formative…