Since vocational education is part of the secondary educational system, a system that is presently under close scrutiny and looking for ways to improve, it is appropriate to determine what the federal role might be in helping to achieve excellence in secondary vocational education. Federal policy has helped to shape secondary vocational education…

This document reports the results of work in identifying promising approaches to the provision of technological update to vocational/technical teachers and barriers as well as facilitators to the use of those approaches. (Technological update refers to the technical, as opposed to pedagogical, knowledge and skills needed by vocational teachers to…

Papers on local area networks (LANs), modelling techniques, software improvement, capacity planning, software engineering, microcomputers and end user computing, cost accounting and chargeback, configuration and performance management, and benchmarking presented at this conference include: (1) "Theoretical Performance Analysis of Virtual…

A study was conducted in 1987 to: (1) assess the impact of the farm financial crisis in Washington State; (2) identify at-risk populations; and (3) suggest appropriate programs and agency responses. Particular emphasis was placed on making recommendations for training and development programs to aid in reemployment of dislocated agricultural…

During the past 10 years, the field of industrial arts, stimulated by rapid technological changes, has changed its name and its focus to technology education. Industrial arts goals chronicled from the 1920s to the present indicate an increased emphasis on the study of industry and technology, critical consumerism, and the development of…

Obtaining accurate, comprehensive data for vocational education has been one of the more elusive objectives of federal policy. Given the long history of unsuccessful attempts to improve the quality and scope of data on vocational education, it is important to understand the lessons of the past before embarking on a new data collection effort…

The 1987-1988 Project SPIRIT programs were evaluated for effectiveness from the points of view of the participants, both parents and children. An initiative of the Congress of National Black Churches that was begun in the summer of 1986, Project SPIRIT aims to nurture children's strength, perseverance, imagination, responsibility, integrity, and…

This report, along with its supplemental volumes, assesses the welfare system and its successes and failures, describes the frustrations felt by the poor in the United States, and proposes a basic change in public assistance policy. America's state and federal governments spend more than $150 billion a year on programs to alleviate poverty, yet…

This report provides an overview of the current welfare system. The number and size of federal public assistance programs have increased during the past 25 years, with particular growth in noncash benefit programs, which now constitute about three-quarters of all means-tested assistance. From mid-1983 to mid-1984, more than 52.5 million Americans…

Evaluation of freshman English programs is a process involving recursive steps, such as planning which elements to review, securing resources to carry out the review, actually reviewing the planned elements, and providing written reports to decision-makers. The four elements of an educational program--contexts, input, process, and product--cohere…

This report examines parent-involvement programs that focus on Hispanic families and the methods that have been used to evaluate these programs. The survey involved 10 Hispanic parent-involvement programs named by various state education agency directors as being significant. Particular attention was given to whether or not the programs were…

Stage Two of the Title IV Quality Control Project is an integrated study of quality in five related Federal financial aid programs for postsecondary students. Section 1 of the paper establishes a framework for defining quality improvements, in order to identify the types of changes that would tend to improve quality across all facets of the…

This report describes a project undertaken at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) between January 1, 1982 and March 31, 1984, which was designed to increase the use in program assessment and in program improvement of information derived from measures of: (1) student achievement in general education; (2) student achievement in the major…

A self-administered questionnaire about practices and attitudes toward vocational special needs (VSN) students was distributed to a sample of 245 secondary industrial education (IE) teachers in seven central states (Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming). Analysis of 135 returns (55 percent) found moderately…

A serious problem in home study in recent years has been that, too often, some schools have been paying little attention to student services. They have concentrated their budgets on advertising to recruit new students, while doing little to encourage present students or new recruits to stay in the program. Efforts have been made to reduce the…