The Technical and Further Education (TAFE) National Centre for Research and Development has two broad areas of activity: the undertaking and encouragement of research and development projects that are of national significance to TAFE and the dissemination of information on research and development in TAFE. The center issued its first corporate…

Strategic planning is a process designed to move an educational organization through the steps of understanding changes in the external environment, assessing organizational strengths and weaknesses, developing a vision of a desired future and ways to achieve that mission, developing and implementing specific plans, and motivating that…

This document comprises a UNESCO-sponsored inventory of documents on educational planning and management in Asia and the Pacific. The database consists of 714 documents from participating countries, divided into 10 subsections by country and indexed according to author and subject. The main entries are grouped alphabetically by country, as…

As defined in chapter I of this guide for policymakers, strategic planning is the method by which an organization identifies relevant trends in its environment, analyzes their potential implications, and projects an integrated strategy to address these future events and their contingencies. This process differs from formalized planning, based on…

Three articles on assessment in higher education include the following: "More Savvy, Good Signs, Next Steps: A Report on the Third National Conference on Assessment in Higher Education," by Pat Hutchings, on tapping expert judgment, getting students invested, and deepening understanding; "Perspectives on General Education and Its…

Intended to develop new approaches to Follow Through services, the research plan described in this document is the first step in a collaborative effort of the National Institute of Education (NIE) and the Follow Through Division of the Department of Education. Prior to the delineation of the preliminary research strategy, background information…

How people live with each other's deepest differences is one of the world's most pressing dilemmas. In this pluralistic age the all too common response has been bigotry, fanaticism, terrorism, and state repression. In the United States, the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment, the public school movement, and the presence of a public…

Intended to illuminate the issues surrounding the coordination of vocational training systems in developing countries, this document raises questions about what should be coordinated, how, by whom, and for what purpose. After an introduction, the following six sections are presented: (1) "The Nature of Coordination," which distinguishes…

To meet growing demands for collecting and using quality information for decision-making, many U.S. school districts are developing database systems that increase their responsiveness to schools and communities. This paper describes how Long Beach Unified School District (California) designed and implemented a Database Management Information…

An in-depth look is presented at how institutions are currently planning for microcomputers. The question is not whether the computer network on campus and between campuses will be the single most important technological event of the century for higher education, but rather how it will occur. Six sections include: the coming of age of…

This handbook is designed to assist schools in organizing and managing an effective school improvement council. It is divided into six sections. Section I describes the benefits of a school improvement council from the perspective of the school district, parents and citizens, teachers, the school administration, and students. Section II provides…

Recent educational literature has stressed the benefits of site-based management and parental involvement in school programs. To capitalize on these benefits, site-based planning teams designed to involve perents, teachers, administrators, students, and community members were developed by the Institute for the Development of Educational Activities…

This study intoduces a strategy for analysing different kinds of phenomena by building "information structures" for analysing how parts make a whole in complex systems. The strategy introduced may be of use when there is a need to understand complex systems or situations; e.g., in various studies of adult education when education is seen as…

In these opening remarks to a 1984 International Conference on Education for the Gifted at the University of Stellenbosch, Union of South Africa, the Director-General of National Education summarizes the South African Government's approach to programs for gifted education. The diversity and complexity of the South African population calls for a…

The Colorado Department of Education undertook the establishment of an educational quality database that would contain the information necessary for measuring the effects of various efforts at educational improvement. Five major planning concerns had to be resolved before the database itself could be established. First, it was determined that…