Data on how teaching effectiveness is affected by faculty incentive grants are presented based on a study of a faculty incentive program at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. Its "Excellence in Teaching" program offers awards of up to $5000 each annually to four faculty members based on student evaluations of teaching performance.…

Building level staff evaluation strategies for the purpose of improving instruction are presented. First, the philosophies of formative and summative evaluation are described. Formative evaluation is a nonjudgmental process, and summative evaluation provides for judgment with performance improvement recommendations. Next, six anxiety-reducing…

The profession of educational administration may find its best route to a unified improvement by way of increasing reflective thought and analysis of the work, coupled with the recognition of real-life politics that makes negotiation and compromise an absolutely essential part of that development. Data were generated from a survey that was…

This report describes the success of SWAS (School Within a School), an early dropout intervention program designed for average to above-average at-risk middle school students selected by the assistant principal. SWAS is a temporary self-contained institution within Davisville Middle School, North Kingstown, Rhode Island. As a prerequisite to…

This document is designed to give teachers some ideas for classroom and school History Day activities. Available ERIC resources about National History Day are listed and a five-point plan to establish a school History Day is provided. Successful approaches to implementing History Day, from actual teachers' experiences, are detailed. A step-by-step…

This document presents a review of the research on experiences outside of the classroom that may affect student achievement during the high school years, focusing specifically on the areas of family influences, peer influences, part-time employment of students, and student participation in extracurricular activities. It reports on studies of…

In a study of whether more student control and responsibility in the classroom would cause them to feel more positive about a task and to like their co-workers better, 57 undergraduates were asked to complete an 8 statement questionnaire on how much control they would be willing to allow others working with them. They were placed in pairs with…

An attempt was made to document the beginning of children's ability to make cognitive-emotional discriminations between skill-dependent outcomes and chance-dependent outcomes of performance on tasks. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 years were administered structurally similar achievement games and effect games. It was thought that as soon as…

Increased emphasis on public school accountability has resulted in several states including a science component in their elementary and middle school testing program. This component often includes items designed to measure process skill ability. The purpose of this study was to examine the performance of high school students on four types of…

School systems interested in improving teacher performance, effectiveness, and job satisfaction while reducing turnover rates might do better to seek ways to enhance the intrinsic rewards of teaching rather than implement such extrinsic motivators as merit pay plans and career ladders. A review of the research literature brings several important…

The major purpose of this study was to describe the rule-governed and contingency-shaped behavior of learning-disabled, hyperactive, and nonselected elementary school children working on a computer-managed task. Hypotheses tested were (1) that the children would differ in the degree to which either instructions or external contingencies controlled…

This report documents the findings of an evaluation of the effectiveness of the information resources management aspects of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 (Public Law 96-511) which went into effect on April 1, 1981. (This law was enacted as a result of concerns that the government must improve its collection, use, and dissemination of…

A method of graphing multivariate data, called the star plot, is very useful in educational contexts because it provides teachers and guidance counselors with information not present in unsupplemented student achievement data. The utility of the method can be seen in analysis of data from a study of factors related to the problem-solving ability…

This paper is limited in scope to the preliminary questions that must be asked about a single instrument before one can use students' impressions of their teachers as part of any diagnostic or evaluation process. The described analysis is intended as illustrative of the kinds of questions that should be obtained to demonstrate the reliability and…

Noting that instructor and course evaluations represent important, ongoing concerns to students, faculty, and administrators in speech communication, this paper uses the experimental approach to consider the purposes of evaluations, explores major evaluation issues, reviews the literature concerning specific variables possibly related to these…