As institutional research or outcome assessment becomes more commonplace in institutions of higher education, the issue of what opportunities this presents to researchers desiring to move past relatively routine reporting into the more creative aspects of the profession becomes more prominent. Several possible roles emerge as a result of the…

Needs assessment is an activity undertaken for planning purposes. It is important to define the limits of the study and design it on a scale appropriate to the entire planning process. This paper suggests that a needs assessment be structured into two phases. In the pre-assessment phase, a conceptual framework and well-defined exploratory…

Issues concerning students' evaluation of college faculty are discussed. Several views of this process are presented. Having identified relevant variables or paradigms, possible relationships between the variables can be studied (models and theories). The assumptions underlying these paradigms include the following: that students have a right and…

State education agencies are in increasing agreement regarding the basic principles that should underlie state educational assessment programs, though some areas of divergent opinion remain. The agencies generally accept the ideas that comparisons between states will be made, that assessment programs should serve multiple purposes, that meaningful…

One of a series of instructional booklets designed to introduce adult education program planners to the basic concepts integral to and alternative strategies for conducting needs assessments, this instructional booklet deals with determining what information to collect when conducting a needs assessment. Described first is the relationship of the…

Interest inventories have been used extensively in high schools and universities to help students make career choices. To determine whether interest inventories aid students with their career development toward their college major and occupational choice, students were assigned to one of six interest inventory groups: Strong-Campbell (N=44); Kuder…

In the early 1970s educational evaluation's fusion of respect for rationality, power to implement rational procedure, and an altruistic objective (improved instruction) appealed to educational researchers. Dealing essentially with closed systems, it measured program success by student performance on measurement instruments. Critics exclaimed that…

This paper evaluates two measurement instruments with regard to their ability to measure children's and young people's attitudes toward animals. The instruments are the Fireman Test (in which children are asked to identify those few animals and/or material possessions which a fireman should try to save during a fire) and the Good Ideas and Bad…

This paper discusses current trends in personnel management, with emphasis on performance standards and employee evaluation. Advances in personnel management from the scientific management theory to the application of the "human side of enterprise" approach should be reflected in how library managers review personnel and operate their libraries.…

The project discussed in this report attempts to establish, within a real school setting, a comprehensive and viable way of determining and reporting the growth and development of kindergarten and primary grade children in the public school. The project was developed by a steering committee of faculty members from the Clayton School District of…

Tasks 5 and 6 describe the dissemination activities and a rating of the National Assessment for Educational Progress social studies exercises by members of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). The dissemination activities, described in a one page report, include a special issue of the NCSS journal "Social Education," May…

Many educational administrators are skeptical of school district attempts to use the planning-programing-budgeting systems (PPBS) tool. This skepticism seems, in large part, to be the result of two factors: (1) A general lack of understanding of the concrete operational steps involved in the implementation of PPBS, and (2) a feeling that the…

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the measurement of child outcomes is the major stumbling block in estimating the extent to which equality of opportunity exists for children in our nation's schools. This paper has three parts. The introduction discusses the concept of equal educational opportunity, as defined and then redefined over the…

The notion that completeness of a goal intent will cause a fundamental change in the whole character of evaluation methodology is discussed. In addition, a series of methodological gaps are described. The focus was the lack of a methodic way to: (1) Establish pertinent goals; (2) Acquire goals such that the original intended outcome remain…

Reports on a study in which students in a first-year engineering materials class were asked to grade their own examinations, and those of others. Comparisons were then made to the same papers graded by their teachers. (TW)