This report summarizes key findings from the literature on effective developmental education practice. It is designed to promote discussion among community college educators and state agency staff in Connecticut as they consider how to improve outcomes for their many students who are academically unprepared to succeed in college. One common theme…

Context and Purpose: With heightened attention to medical errors and patient safety, we surveyed Utah and Missouri hospitals to assess the "state of the art" in patient safety systems and identify changes over time. This study examines differences between urban and rural hospitals. Methods: Survey of all acute care hospitals in Utah and…

To enable improvements in school health promotion, this paper examines associations between the number of health-promotion issues addressed by primary school teachers in the Netherlands and factors thought to influence this behavior. The main factors studied are context characteristics and constructs of attitude, social influence, self-efficacy…

This article describes a physical education program self-assessment tool, "The Physical Activity and Fitness Promotion Checklist," which was developed by a panel of nationally recognized physical education teachers. This checklist, which specifically addresses national physical education standards three and four, includes 20 items organized into…

A pilot study was designed to examine student perspectives on the first two years of the foreign language program at an east coast college. The study addresses key areas of foreign language teaching and learning in terms of goals and objectives, effectiveness of instruction and instructional approach, and student suggestions for improvement. The…

The Early Development Index (EDI) is a teacher-completed checklist, intended to be a population-level tool to measure children's readiness for school and to alert communities to potential developmental problems in children. In response to the increasing popularity of the EDI, this paper provides a critical and timely evaluation and identifies the…

In fall 1993, the Master Plan Committee was established at the City College of San Francisco to develop priorities for the college. The committee developed a comprehensive long-range master plan for the 1994-99 period, proposing 25 planning goals and 112 institutional objectives. This report provides results from an assessment of progress made…

This report, the 10th in a series of the National Governor's Association (NGA) project "Facilitating Improvement of State Programs for Pregnant Women and Children," describes ongoing efforts of facilitating development of provider participation in Medicaid. The objective of the project is to identify where participation problems result…

The latest round of proposed state and federal welfare reforms has major implications for state work force development systems. These systems will face new demands generated by the need to help welfare recipients find jobs before they reach the time limits on aid and the need for states to meet the new work participation rates for federal welfare…

This guidebook was developed for schools to use to improve their current career planning efforts by placing career planning in the context of a comprehensive guidance program. The guidebook defines activities that make up life planning and provides the framework for students to conduct self-reviews using these career planning principles. The…

Since the inaugural meeting of the Southeastern Association of Community College Research in 1975, the research conducted at community colleges, as well as the issues facing researchers, have remained fairly constant. Research has been consistently understaffed and the themes of research have tended to focus on relating student progress to…

This collection of six articles describes essential features of systemic program evaluation. Articles are: (1) "Programs Need to Go Beyond 'Comprehensive'" (R. Jerry Adams and Kim Yap); (2) "Systematic Planning of Goals for Desired Outcomes" (Steve Nelson); (3) "A Framework for Conducting Systematic Evaluation" (Dean Arrasmith); (4) "Developing…

The current pressures of reduced government funding, lower enrollments, and greater scrutiny by governing boards require institutions of higher education to redesign processes and systems to survive. Despite resistance to Total Quality Management (TQM) in academia, it can provide the tools to implement systemic change and quality improvement.…

This report is the first annual report under the Nebraska legislature's Quality Child Care Act; it provides information on more than the past year to place the programs and services described in context. The report sought to determine the status of child care and early childhood education in Nebraska, recognizing that the younger the child, the…

School staff at the O'Connor Cooperative School in Australia had been concerned for some time about the difficulties faced by parents trying to fit traditional short preschool hours into their varying lifestyles. Their solution was to provide child care at the conclusion of the normal preschool session and on the two days per week that preschool…