The Temple University Center for Vocational Education Professional Personnel Development (PPD), one of three regional centers in Pennsylvania, used qualitative strategies for steering PPD programs. Center personnel found that collecting quantitative data was absolutely necessary to determine whether objectives were being met, but was not always…

In 1988, the United States Congress passed legislation that created the School Dropout Demonstration Assistance Program (SDDAP). The program provides funding for local educational agencies, community-based organizations, and educational partnerships to establish effective programs. This report, the second of two volumes, presents statistical data…

A general methodology approach is suggested for measurement of workforce readiness competencies in the context of overall work by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing on the domain-independent measurement of workforce readiness skills. The methodology consists of 14 steps, from the initial selection of a…

Poor preparation of adult literacy educators is often blamed for the failure of adult literacy students. Four critical issues related to developing the adult literacy professional work force are as follows: how literacy is learned in adulthood; how practitioners learn and improve their practice; how new knowledge is generated in and for the field;…

Inquiry-based staff development is a promising direction for rethinking practice and research and for generating knowledge from a field-based perspective for adult literacy. Rethinking staff development entails investigating a number of current assumptions: the nature and function of literacy learning in adulthood; adult literacy practitioners as…

Among the plethora of cooperative learning studies, several investigations of cooperative or group assessment (CA) have appeared. In this investigation, the methodology of R. R. McCown (1992) is refined to examine CA in a classroom setting, primarily examining achievement outcomes and student perceptions of the CA process. Fifty-six undergraduates…

As the latest in a series of studies analyzing the data reported on Tennessee's school district report cards, this paper focuses on finding a common statistical treatment to examine the impact of predictor variables on dependent variables. Investigations of the 1988-89 report card data explored the relationships among eight school district…

Mastery learning research focuses on learner-oriented and instruction-based factors that relate the concepts of time as a variable and high student achievement as a constant. This research emphasis encompasses optimistic assumptions about the capability of students to learn if: (1) alterable variables are optimized, and (2)…

This report illustrates the use of hierarchical linear models (HLM) with National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data to identify school and other correlates of student achievement. Based on an analysis of the 1990 NAEP mathematics achievement data for 4th, 8th, and 12th graders in public schools, this study is part of an ongoing…

This paper examines factors possibly responsible for the poor outcomes of many children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and suggests possible ways of improving services to this population. It is concluded that each of the etiological factors identified for ADHD has its own characteristics, driven by genetic vulnerabilities and…

The training of researchers in the educational technology field has continued in the traditional vein of the experimental paradigm. This document describes a workshop presented to balance that training and to prepare students to undertake research in a non-traditional way. The workshop aimed to acquaint students with non-causal naturalistic…

This monograph presents the proceedings of the first National Institute on Drug Abuse technical review related to the conduct of controlled studies on prenatal exposure to drugs of abuse. Papers in the monograph are categorized by session. The first session (two papers) focused on the detection and quantification of prenatal drug exposure in…

The framework and results of a study exploring the effects of alternative assessment on mathematics teaching are reported. The instrument for the observation of alternative assessment in the classroom, based on the processes defined by P. L. Peterson (1988), is described along with a discussion of the methodology and the data implications.…

Nineteen papers concerning various aspects of distance education and distance education research are presented in this document. The papers are: (1) "Introduction, Celebrating Difference in Research in Distance Education" (Terry Evans); (2) "Discourse or Discord? A Dilemma of Distance Education" (Philip Juler); (3)…

While national trends in liberal arts course offerings in community colleges have been charted for many years, trends in non-liberal courses have not been similarly mapped. In an effort to gain a better understanding of the entire community college curriculum, the Center for the Study of Community Colleges (CSCC), in Los Angeles, California,…