In order to contribute to the refinement of methods for assessing the adequacy of program implementation, this study investigated data collection efforts made during the implementation of ALERTA, a bilingual, multicultural preschool curriculum model. Comparisons of results are made with those of previously conducted studies of program…

To better understand the effects of the media on audiences, five media sociology theoretical approaches to the study of influences on media were investigated by looking at tests of the approaches in three journals over the last 10 years. The mirror approach predicted that the media would accurately represent reality, but, while accurate, the media…

The "symbol systems approach" to the study of computers in education that is outlined avoids the pitfalls of past media research--particularly research on the effects of television on children's learning and knowledge--and asserts that media can be usefully distinguished in terms of the symbol systems they present and the kinds of…

This report presents findings of a national mail survey of school principals conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in Spring 1982 to assess recent changes in computer availability and to obtain data about instructional uses and needs from the school perspective. Results are reported for the following topics addressed by…

Research on reading teacher effectiveness has taken several different directions over the past 30 years: during the 1950s and most of the 1960s, research focused primarily on teacher qualities; in the early 1970s attention shifted to the effect of the teaching process on student learning, while in the late 1970s and early 1980s experiments defined…

A study measured the connotations of selected health education related journals to their professional readers. The subjects were 250 randomly selected, college-affiliated health educators listed in "A National Directory of College and University Health Education Programs and Facilities 1981." Journals evaluated included: (1) "American College…

The research leading to the decisions to revise the Graduate Record Examination Aptitude Test (GRE) (beginning in October 1981) is reviewed. The issues discussed include the format of the test (the timing of each section and the number of sections, the content of the sections--especially the analytical section), the scoring procedure for the GRE,…

The legitimacy of using the criterion of low reading achievement in the study of learning and memory skills with learning disabled children was assessed, based on a comparison of 35 nondisabled students, 15 low readers, and 10 learning disabled high school students. Learning disabilities were defined as encompassing perceptual and/or processing…

Suicide is one of the least understood of human behaviors, especially the causes and factors associated with suicide in young children. To replicate and clarify an earlier study, which used a methodology for determining suicidal ideation in different groups of people by examining the thoughts and ideas they projected onto another, 2,386 subjects…

Human factors engineering can be defined as the application of scientific principles, methods, and data drawn from a variety of disciplines to the development of engineering systems in which people play a significant role. Since human factors issues arise in every domain in which humans interact with the products of a technological society, six…

A cafeteria-style approach for evaluating primary grade programs in a large metropolitan school district is described. This evaluation approach involved planning between one and four evaluation options for each of 17 program options available to the district's 70 elementary schools. About 20,000 kindergarten through grade 3 students were enrolled…

This paper reports on a study developed to determine what experts in the area of educational research perceive as the basic skills and knowledge areas that one who has successfully completed a one-semester graduate course in educational research should possess. A decision was made to conduct a Delphi study to identify these skills and knowledge…

As a step in combining three of the Elementary and Secondary Education surveys of the National Center for Education Statistics to produce one database linking local education agencies, schools, and teachers, the merged procedures and collections forms were pretested. Different methods were tested by splitting the pretest sample of 220 public…

A comparative analysis was made in the Netherlands of three projects aimed at answering the following research questions: (1) what are the backgrounds and characteristics of the methods for the construction of qualification profiles (a description of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for job performance) for the curriculum and training…

A study of Arizona vocational education follow-up systems was designed to survey problems in and promising practices for developing information systems to provide useful data for decision making. Interviews with state, county, college, and school district personnel revealed that the major problem faced by those conducting follow-up studies at both…