Tips are offered for using the needs/interest survey process to provide continuing and community education programmers with information for setting goals and establishing program objectives. Some of the 50 tips include using only those questions essential to programming, restricting the length, targeting the survey, getting input on topics…

This final report describes the review and evaluation of 10 years of Pennsylvania's 310 special projects in the areas of program promotion, program linkages, and staff development. Three major selection criteria were effectiveness, innovative qualities, and adoptability. Of some 97 projects reviewed, 21 were deemed exemplary. A reader survey of…

Graphing is a common and powerful symbol system for representing concrete data. Yet research has shown that students often have graphical misconceptions about how graphs are related to the concrete event. Currently, the Technical Education Research Center (TERC) is developing microcomputer-based laboratories (MBL) science units that use probes to…

Arguing that the history of the field of educational technology has been one of glorious promises, many of them only partially fulfilled, this paper presents the premise that desktop publishing (DTP) is just another production fad that will have little lasting effect on the quality of education. Potential benefits of DTP are described as: (1)…

A project was conducted to develop a curriculum and training materials to be used in training industrial operatives in statistical process control (SPC) techniques. During the first phase of the project, questionnaires were sent to 685 companies (215 of which responded) to determine where SPC was being used, what type of SPC firms needed, and how…

This collection of five essays and supporting material concerning foreign language proficiency makes specific and controversial statements about what proficiency means for diverse groups of practitioners: the classroom teacher, the curriculum developer, the language-learning researcher, the textbook publisher, and the businessperson. An…

The two goals of this investigation were to (1) examine the comprehension monitoring strategies adults employ when trying to understand procedural instructions and (2) determine how comprehension may be affected by varying such instructions. Sixty-eight college students, using instructions that consisted of either text alone, illustrations alone,…

This booklet describes how the effectiveness of a one-on-one internal labor union organizing effort can be improved by incorporating an organizing survey within the one-on-one canvassing process. It also explains how collective bargaining strategies can benefit from the inclusion of a survey of the bargaining unit. To explore these applications of…

A sequel to the booklet "How to Produce Printed and Duplicated Materials," this booklet begins by providing an overview of programmed learning. This introduction shows how the field has developed since the work of B. F. Skinner in the 1950s and explains what is generally meant by the term "programmed learning" today. Guidelines…

The manual is intended to help writers or adapters of instructional materials for deaf students. The first section examines difficulties in providing suitable reading material for deaf students. The problems in evaluating deaf students' reading levels are examined. Writers are cautioned to pay particular attention to syntax, vocabulary, and…

This paper proposes that three properties of graphic materials can be manipulated by instructional designers to model cognitive processes and thus help students learn. These properties are: the distance of elements in the graphic display from each other, the orientation of the elements to each other, and the sequence in which the elements are…

An innovative educational medium--screenprinted visual aids on cloth--is one alternative to conventional media in Africa, where visual materials are important communication tools but conventional media and materials are often scarce. A production process for cloth visual aids was developed and evaluated in Ghana and Sudan through the…

An overview of the research and design process that led to the creation of the Bank Street word processing program for children is reported. The decision to create a word processor for the classroom was based on the findings that commercially available programs took too long to learn, required the memorization of too many commands or rules, had…