Californias public and legislative demands over transfer performance as exemplified by the Partnerships for Excellence (PFE) Transfer model reflect a growing national trend. According to the Education Commission of the States, there has been a shift in the national mood from concern about fiscal accountability in education to one of educational…

The report details the activities of the Virginia Assessment Study Group in documenting the utility of various approaches to assessing adult education programs and instruction within the state. A group of diverse practitioners convened during 1997 to establish project objectives and research questions and to report on their work. The reports of…

This paper makes recommendations for developing the next generation of state accountability systems for postsecondary vocational education (PVE). It focuses on the need to improve the core indicators for PVE; reduce the burden and improve the value of Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Amendments of 1998 (Perkins III)…

This paper outlines a series of quantitative and qualitative models for understanding and evaluating the use of electronic scholarly journals, and summarizes data based on the experience of Project Muse at Johns Hopkins University and early feedback received from subscribing libraries. Project Muse is a collaborative initiative between the Press…

Designed to guide and structure the needs assessment of Pennsylvania children with special health care needs, this document describes six specific steps in planning and conducting a needs assessment. The steps include: (1) stating the goals of the needs assessment, including fulfilling legislative mandates, identifying geographical areas that have…

This guidebook, prepared by a faculty committee at Michigan State University (MSU) in 1995-96, is intended to encourage discussion of quality outreach among faculty, staff, administrators, and university collaborators. Its specific purpose is to develop an understanding of what constitutes quality outreach, to enhance unit-level planning for…

Data from nine Michigan elementary, middle, and high schools highlight the challenges and common strategies found in the use of student assessment data to meet public demands for accountability. The information gathered from assessment tools varies by frequency and type. Educators have, historically, underutilized data to guide practice because…

A survey of rural New York residents examined community opinions about various traditional and nontraditional school performance criteria that could be used in a local "school report card." Completed surveys were received from 1,821 residents of 29 of the 245 small and rural school districts that participate in the New York Rural Schools…

The Creative Curriculum for preschool education is a teaching framework that addresses children's emotional, cognitive, and physical development. This checklist is designed for use in assessing how well the curriculum is being implemented as intended and includes a classroom profile form and a progress and planning form. The implementation…

A project was conducted to redesign the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) Bureau of Adult Basic and Literacy Education required student tracking form to provide for better student tracking. The Student Intake and Data form supplied by the PDE from program year 1996-97 was used as a point of comparison, and evaluations of this form by…

This guide to different/alternative assessment was prepared for participants in the Rural School and Community Trust, formerly the Annenberg Rural Challenge. Given that Rural Trust participants focus on local place-based education and the relationship between rural schools and their communities, they are not, by and large, enamored of the…

This article reports the findings of a study that sought to find out how useful library World Wide Web sites of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were as tools for disseminating information and providing services to users. The study compared the library Web sites of public supported HBCUs with Web sites of other public supported…

This study is an examination of the test results of 90 academically oriented adult participants on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Canadian Language Benchmarks Assessment (CBLA), to determine the comparability of performance on the two tests and the possibility of using two tests in the academic admissions process for…

This second edition of a resource designed to help teachers find relevant information on the Internet for both themselves and their students, provides concise reviews of more than 1,000 Web sites sorted by subject area. Each site is evaluated with one to five stars for content, presentation and grade level. Easy-to-follow explanations are provided…

The report, entirely in French, describes Alberta's curriculum for ninth-year French native language instruction, as revised in 1998. An introductory section offers background information on the curriculum's design, links between the core curriculum and French native language instruction, underlying principles of language instruction, the…