Based on the philosophy that language is central to learning, this booklet defines common curriculum goals for elementary and secondary schools that combine both general, essential learning skills and the common knowledge and skills that form a strong English language arts curriculum. The guide has two main sections: the receptive section focuses…

Evaluation can serve a variety of educational management questions, but an administrator's ability to use evaluation as a management tool depends not only upon his or her own perception of evaluation but also on the perceptions of other potential evaluation users in the system. Research has uncovered a variety of factors influencing an…

The question of whether improvements in assessment data for students referred to special education would result in the increased use of these data and a better basis for teaching decisions was studied. Six versions of an assessment report were prepared for a hypothetical child: four with increasing detail and information, one with an integrated…

Examples of the difficulties that public school program evaluators can have in explaning perplexing results are provided. Arguments abound over the best way to report a finding that has multiple interpretations or presentation options, and the enigma of realizing that one way to report a finding is not the only way, or even necessarily the best…

Course evaluation data can be a meaningful resource to improve the human resource development (HRD) practitioner's decision making. Recommended properties of an effective evaluation form are separation of the overall evaluation from the evaluation of specific aspects; a one-to-nine rating scale; strong, explicit verbal anchors on the rating scale;…

The resurgence of testing and the significance of this trend to learning assistance facilitators and developmental educators are discussed. This increase in testing, particularly as it manifests itself on college and university campuses, reflects a shift of emphasis in testing, from measuring aptitude to measuring the effect of instruction.…

Recent commission and task force reports calling for educational improvement may carry more weight than their content deserves because of their sources. The findings of these commissions vary since each commission has its own concept of education, its own political purposes, and its own sources of data. Still, their general recommendations stress…

The idea that all curricula should reflect learnings that are common across subject areas has only recently been considered in British Columbia. Within the past year, the change in focus resulted from the British Columbia Ministry of Education's (BCME) adoption of a definition of an educated person as an ideal toward which educators should be…

The philosophy of accreditation is discussed in a paper commissioned by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools for a project on "Rethinking Accreditation." After defining accreditation and distinguishing it from assessment, evaluation and "meta-evaluation" are discussed, including the nature of accreditation in…

This four-part book shows how teachers, counselors, directors, and administrators can assess and evaluate their mathematics and science programs. The examples provided are drawn primarily from programs for women, but the methodology is generalizable to interventions for various populations. The two chapters in part I give an overview of the…

The purposes of this study are: (1) to investigate the attitudes of Florida Extension Service specialists toward in-service education evaluation; (2) to determine the extent to which extension specialists are evaluating in-service education programs for which they have responsibility; (3) to determine the kinds of in-service education evaluation…

The process of developing a testing/evaluation/instruction management subsystem that will be uniquely suited to the specific situation of a given district requires a decision to use a strategy for instructional change in which data from testing and evaluation would play a major role. Considerations that might go into such a decision involve some…

This investigation employed an in-basket simulation to assess the effect of provisional analysis on the use of evaluation data by program administrators in making program decisions. Sixty-five volunteers from graduate education courses and 52 volunteers from undergraduate educational psychology classes at Western Kentucky University were randomly…

Teacher educators of the Instructional Leadership Program at the University of Vermont used interactive evaluation procedures (including numerical, process, and summative approaches) to inform their decisions about program improvement through a new training option for regular and special education leaders. (CB)

Two recent reports on reading have attempted to do the following: (1) summarize national trends in reading performance; (2) review research pertaining to reading education. After discussing the findings of both, the article concludes that each fails to address seriously the broad cultural significance of illiteracy and literacy. (PS)