Purpose: The main objective of this paper is to discuss the relationship between obstacles and weaknesses facing the development of MTPs and SMEs. In recent years many management training programmes (MTPs) of an off-the-job nature have been established in Palestine, after the peace agreement, in order to find a solution for apparent lack of…

School finance adequacy litigation has become a widely-used means in the efforts to improve educational outcomes for children. This form of litigation has been attempted in nearly every state over the past two decades. Despite its prevalence, its effectiveness remains questionable due to a lack of study relating finance litigation to student…

This report presents preliminary findings from the Reading First Impact Study, a congressionally mandated evaluation of the federal government initiative to help all children read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) established Reading First and mandated its evaluation. This document is…

Despite the fact that students are an important component of the educational process, their preferences for instruction are not typically a consideration for classroom practices. The purpose of this survey study was to determine high school students' preferences for methods used in the instruction of literary works of art. Students expressed…

With the growing interest in educational accountability and outcomes-based education, there is an increasing emphasis on testing. This paper proposes the development of school-achievement profiles as a tool to assist with the interpretation and implementation of test results for targeting instructional improvement efforts. The study employed test…

This paper presents findings of a study that determined if there is a significant relationship between federal expenditures for education and federal expenditures for public assistance. Data on federal primary and secondary educational expenditures, federal public-assistance expenditures, the number of public-assistance recipients, the enrollment…

The use of scientific calculators on standardized mathematics tests is becoming more common, and how their use affects the standardized testing process continues to be a topic of study. This study extends previous work by examining test item characteristics and equity issues, asking whether items designed to be "calculator neutral"…

Should teachers be held responsible for their long-term influence over students? Should monitoring systems be extended to cover the long-term impact of teachers, departments, and schools? This paper describes a longitudinal study that extended a British comprehensive monitoring system--the A Level Information System (ALIS)--to examine the effects…

An approach is described that reveals the hierarchical test structure (HTS) based on the cognitive demands of the test items, and conducts a linear trait modeling by using the HST elements as item difficulty components. This approach, referred to as the Hierarchical Latent Trait Approach (HLTA), employs an algorithm that allows all test items to…

Each year the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) publishes a pocket summary of their "Projections of Education Statistics." This summary reviews data on U.S. education from 1980-81 and provides predictions of educational data until 2002-03. Included are tables summarizing population trends and tables of elementary school and…

Two studies examined the validity of a model of procedural document processing, and the relationships among document features, reader characteristics, and successful completion of a button-sewing task. The first study tested three information sources. Subjects were 12 seventh-grade, 12 tenth-grade, and 12 adult students who used 2 commercially…

This paper presents findings of a study that sought to determine whether a composite score is a more appropriate dependent variable in the measurement of school effectiveness than any one component score. The viability of using a composite score, such as the School Effectiveness Index (SEI), was compared with the viability of using any one of five…

A study examined the relationships among elementary school principals' knowledge of reading, principals' involvement in the school reading program, teachers' knowledge of reading, and elementary school student reading achievement. Subjects, 20 principals and 68 teachers from 20 schools in a small western city, responded to a 20-item survey…

Two studies that compare the use of analysis of patterns in time (APT) (formerly non-metric temporal path analysis) and the linear models approach (LMA) are reported. In the first study, scores on the College Entrance Examination Board French Achievement Test (CEEBFAT), number of years of study of high school French (YHSF), and course achievement…

The strategies college students use to retain material that is low in meaningfulness were studied. Participants were 149 undergraduate teacher-training students in human development and learning classes. Students randomly received and were asked to memorize one of three 15-item lists: nonsense syllables, unrelated words, or related words. A brief…