The development of external planning for colleges and universities as a function of state government is continuing to evolve. It is an area in which the role and responsibilities of the state and of the institutions are frequently matters of contention. Several reasons have been given for this state interest: the growth of state government, the…

The Small College Consortium is a project funded under Title III of the Higher Education Act of 1965 for developing institutions. Under the project, technical assistance and financial resources were provided to 54 colleges to learn to use new techniques and processes to overcome weak areas of their institutions. The evaluation covers the fiscal…

Proficiency, or competency, testing is a recent attempt to meet the public demand for accountability. But instead of placing the responsibility on the educational organization, competency testing appears to be a sophisticated approach to holding students and teachers accountable. Although some form of student assessment is needed, it is not yet…

Elements of economic production theory are applied to the relation between time and student learning. The analysis takes into account that individual students matter, that students are often taught in classes, and that jointness in production is the rule rather than the exception. The values teachers place on the different possible educational…

This manual is intended to help citizen groups set up their own on-the-job training activities, tailored to their own individual needs, issues, learning styles, and experiences. Specifically, it discusses ways citizens or citizen groups can use the governmental processes to solve social problems and how they can develop clout to hold governmental…

Before teacher evaluation forms can have any significance for educational research their validity and reliability must be established. This study concerns itself with defining the suitability of the criteria-establishing items that may be contained on teacher evaluations. The areas of inquiry are: the rater (evaluator) difficulty level of each…

Whether college is worth what it costs is reviewed in this summarization of the author's book, "Investment in Learning." A survey of the literature leads to the following four conclusions. (1) that the economic returns of higher education, in the form of higher earnings, improved technology, and a higher gross national product, alone offset the…

This document is the second annual report of the activities of the Program of Research and Evaluation for Public Schools (PREPS). The mission of PREPS, a consortium of public school districts in Mississippi, is to aid member schools in obtaining quality data from which curricular and administrative decisions can be made. Technical assistance…

This manual is based on the belief that sufficient instructions on attendance accounting already existed, mostly in California laws and regulations and that attempts to restate the instructions in language other than the original might mislead the reader as to the intent and meaning of the instructions. The result is that the text of the manual…

This paper describes procedures developed for evaluating the tutorial program at a two-year college. At the end of each school term, evaluation forms are sent to faculty from whose classes the tutees have come, to the tutors, and to the tutees. As part of an objective evaluation system, the program directors have developed a method for converting…

Provided is an overview of the Education for all Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142), including a report of the history of federal involvement in the education of the handicapped. Sections cover ten critical issues dealt with in the new law, such as the concepts of zero reject, appropriate education, and least restrictive alternative, and…

The suit of Peter Doe v. the San Francisco Unified School District resulted because the client was awarded a high school diploma attesting to the fact that he had satisfactorily completed all the requirements for high school graduation; however, the client was unable to read above a fifth-grade level or to adequately function in society. The court…

Documenting the inefficiency of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs for American Indians, this report discusses HUD program administration and presents specific recommendations. The report is divided into the following sections and subsections: (1) 1977 is the ninth consecutive year HUD has promised more Indian housing than it has…

A management by objectives approach to evaluation develops performance objectives as a means of minimizing the bias related to individual judgment. This paper focuses on three variables which contribute to the presence of subjectivity in performance evaluation. The first of these is psychological and includes such factors as judgment, power…

The five papers in this symposium address several key issues included in evaluation research. In "Designing State Vocational Rehabilitation Agency Evaluation Research", Stanford E. Rubin discusses the importance of practitioner involvement in the development of research questions and plans and introduces three basic models of evaluative research.…