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…

Error profiles for the Fall Enrollment Survey of the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS) were developed as part of an assessment of the quality of survey data. Three statistics were of particular interest: the count of full-time equivalent students, the breakdown by race/ethnicity, and the count of unclassified students. Attention…

With increasing reliance being placed on the results of their surveys, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) recognized a need for these survey results to be valid and reliable. As part of the work of the Statistical Analysis Group in Education (SAGE), an effort was undertaken to investigate validity and reliability in survey…

Different language sample elicitation techniques may be appropriate for different linguistic phenomena and for learners at different phases of acquisition. These techniques include elicited production, manipulation of given linguistic material (sentence combining, sentence completion), intuition and grammaticality judgment tests, introspection,…

The instructional information system (IIS), a method by which instructionally relevant information can be collected, stored, processed, and reported to various users in a timely manner, has considerable potential to improve instruction. To better identify the circumstances in which the IIS will succeed, it is necessary to know more about how…

The policy papers included in this package address various facets of the topic of data-based accountability for education in California. Guy Benveniste of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Education explores the underlying issue of accountability and describes the implications of different types of accountability measures. In…

In preparation for a major research study on change in schools, a 3-month pilot study of principals in 10 schools was conducted in central Texas. The main purpose of the study was to investigate different ways to document the actions taken by the principals to facilitate implementation of innovations in their schools. In this paper, the procedures…

A study was sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges to: (1) document and analyze the information needs of various groups (e.g., the legislature, state agencies, and community colleges) with respect to the state's community colleges and to prepare a matrix of information needs and uses; (2) inventory the…

Two major areas are recommended in the redesign of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data collection: assessment of social and communicative competence, and description of classroom processes. Social and communicative competence are important achievements of the school-age years and are heavily influenced by classroom…

This report presents data, describing mostly on-site institutional resources, from the 118 U.S. and Canadian research libraries that were members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) during the 1986-87 fiscal year. The following information is included in the document: (1) ARL library data tables reflecting data on collections,…

The main aim of the International Institute for Educational Planning's program "Training the Trainers" is to improve the technical skills of planning specialists and to develop their organizational capabilities so that they can run national training programs. The objectives of the workshop described in this reort were to design the…

This paper explores the use of data for evidence in the task of building dialogue in an action research project developed for student teachers in the University of Wisconsin "Action Research on Action Research" project. Three particular uses are found. First, data in the form of information is gathered on a topic under discussion or investigation,…

The Study Group on Pre-Collegiate Education Quality Indicators was formed to determine means of obtaining information on elementary and secondary educational quality within and across states. Two papers: "State-by-State Comparisons of Student Achievement" (Robert L. Linn) and "The Effectiveness of American Education" (Eva L.…

This manual has been designed to assist in the conversion of schools to the SIMS (Student Information Management System) School System. SIMS is based on a software package modified for use in the North Carolina Public School System. The term "conversion" refers to the process of changing the current records system to a new one, thus…

The Urban Community Colleges Transfer Opportunities Program (UCCTOP) was initiated in 1983 to stimulate the transfer of minority students from community colleges to universities. Collecting data on the effects of the UCCTOP activities proved to be one of the most difficult aspects of the project as community colleges typically do not have reliable…