Guidelines are offered to a college or university for conducting a communication audit. These include steps in planning the audit, use of the variety of tools available for administering the audit, the development and feedback to the institution, and development of recommendations to improve institutional communication. (JMF)

Suggests that community college practitioners employ a guerilla mentality in dealing with the institutional accreditation processes to build support and to secure gains for the community services function. Delineates suggestions to community service professionals in preparing for and handling the accreditation visit to the advantage of the…

Senior marketing research students conducted an unobtrusive survey of reference services at Central Missouri State University, and found 74% of reference transactions rated satisfactory or very satisfactory. Focus groups suggested including library information in freshman orientation packets, providing reference help during the day, and requiring…

Reviews the role of accreditation in American higher education and shortcomings related to its inconsistency and lack of rigor. Discusses the 1996 creation of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) to oversee accreditation activities. Describes CHEA's organizational structure and analyzes its impact on accreditation and educational…

Discusses three distinct but related efforts toward postsecondary outcomes assessment in Washington: assessment, accountability, and accreditation. Analyzes the ongoing struggle to find a productive synthesis of these three arenas, provides an historical context for the work to date, and makes suggestions for "assessment-as-learning."…

Argues that college size is a valid, readily available, easily understood, and nonjudgmental criterion that relates directly to other important college characteristics. Therefore, size should be considered the main criterion in the classification of community colleges. Using size as a criterion yields interesting patterns showing how community…

Suggests that critical events rather than performance trends affect collective evaluation of public education. Data from public opinion surveys in Nashville, Tennessee, demonstrate episodic diminutions of public esteem for public schools attached to critical events. Results show that political interventions by social movements or political elites…

A superintendent describes his district's use of an assessment tool to diagnosis internal conditions and relationships in the district and then prescribe action plans for improvement that were implemented through the remainder of the year. Also contains a six-point list of leadership belief statements. (MLF)

University public relations directors are offered guidelines for conducting an economic impact study to evaluate the institution's worth to the community. Discussed are positive and negative aspects of such studies, the selection of a formal or informal research approach, testing study validity, and disseminating the information. (DB)

Reviews the efforts of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools to reexamine the role of accrediting agencies in promoting institutional quality and institutional improvement. Summarizes the content of a series of sessions on the topic at the 1989 annual meeting of the association. (DMM)

Presents the informal position of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools regarding how accreditation can best incorporate the goal of improving institutional quality without diminishing its success in measuring threshold quality. (DMM)

Presents a matrix that can be used by accreditation team members to gather, organize, analyze, and report descriptive and evaluative information about instructional support components, teacher observations/interviews, and curriculum evaluation. (DMM)

This article describes Local Education Authority (LEA) practices in England and Wales, with regard to institutional evaluation during the mid to late 1980s. It considers the various approaches and systems used and particularly looks at issues of information handling, reporting, follow-up, and adviser (inspector) training. (IAH)

Compared responses of 132 training directors and 79 clinical members of American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy regarding current specified standards for accreditation of Marriage and Family Therapy training programs. Results about preferred criteria for accreditation, training requirements, and attitudes toward major professional…

A discussion of quality assurance in Portuguese universities looks at the environment of expanding enrollments and new laws concerning program quality. It is proposed that evaluation should be informative, exhaustive, and concise, and should involve cooperation between evaluators both internal and external to the institution. (MSE)