Kindergarten teachers' directives uttered during the first month of school were compared with those uttered three months later. It was expected that changes associated with different classroom organizational structures, with increasing child sophistication, and with size of group being addressed, would influence the type and clarity of teacher…

Treatment verification methodology was employed in studying the Chicago Child Parent Center (CPC) compensatory education program. Established in disadvantaged areas by the Chicago public schools, CPCs are designed to break the cycle of poverty through educational intervention with children at ages 3 through 8. An element of evaluation studies that…

Within the multidisciplinary setting of the Brookline Early Education Project, the present investigation examined the relationship between observations of parents, pediatricians, psychologists and teachers. The study was designed to examine two questions: (1) Are systematically collected parent reports of their children's current development…

This study was designed to identify a set of research questions and testable hypothesis to aid in planning long-range research. Five mathematics teachers were selected. These instructors enrolled in a special project-related seminar, video-taped sessions of their own mathematics classes, and kept field journals. The group met once a week to…

A longitudinal investigation of teacher-pupil directive interactions in kindergartens was designed to study stability, change, and structures underlying classroom directive exchanges. Three kindergarten classes were observed four times during a school year. Teacher directives were classified as to type and clarity, while concomitants of 748…

A system for the observation and analysis of elementary school science classroom instruction is described, including the management and content of science lessons for both narrative and coded data. (CS)

In third world countries a key to the course of nation building is the modernization of the organizational and administrative infrastructures that drive the development process. The focus of this paper is the ministry of education (MOE), an institution that has found its role changed dramatically since midcentury in most Latin American nations. In…

This operations manual for field staff (site monitors, site coordinators, and testers) involved in the observation and testing of children is part of a series of documents on the evaluation of Project Developmental Continuity (PDC), a Head Start demonstration program aimed at providing educational and developmental continuity between children's…

This classroom observation manual (Fall 1976) was developed for use in the evaluation of Project Developmental Continuity (PDC), a Head Start demonstration program aimed at providing educational and developmental continuity between children's Head Start and primary school experiences. The manual provides detailed instructions for the observer on…

The state of the art in observational studies is discussed, with emphasis on explanatory research--studies of program effectiveness in which an attempt is made to explain the reasons for the results as well as describing the results. In addition to the collection of data and presentation of statistical facts, the explanatory study involves the…

Two predictors of coding performance were validated when 26 trained subjects used the Flanders System of Interaction Analysis to code 11 half-hour videotapes of fifth grade classrooms. The Teacher Evaluation Scale, a high-inference rating system based on the Global Rating Scales, was also used. The predictors were scores on a shortened form of the…

This fourth grade project was piloted in seven Detroit area schools to ascertain whether the School Health Curriculum could be implemented on a broader scale. It was anticipated that the majority of the schools would be unable to finish all units of the curriculum, so student achievement was not assessed. The evaluation focused instead on…

Approximately 200 hours of observation of classes in 13 school districts, selected to represent diverse SES and expenditure levels, were coded for various dimensions of classroom activity structure. The coding categories were derived from prior work by Grump and Grannis. In addition, observations of individual students' on-task behavior were made.…

Presented is a 30-item observational instrument to be used for the evaluation and description of preservice or inservice science teaching in the elementary school. Sections of the instrument include (1) use of intellectual development stages, (2) performance objectives, (3) lesson planning skills, (4) instruction sequencing, (5) question asking…

In comparison with traditional experimental design, which is concerned with what happened, a case study approach is more appropriate for answering the question of why or how something happened. As an alternative complementary-vocational-education-evaluation approach, the case study attempts to describe and analyze some program in comprehensive…