The focus-group interview format was used to investigate the existence, interrelationship, perceived strengths, and indicators of insufficiency in the implementation of the Career Ladders (CL) teacher-incentive program in a rural Arizona school district. Two interviews were planned for each of the following groups: school board members; CL…

The Organizational Communication Profile (OCP) provides a way to survey organization member attitudes, perceptions, expectations, and degree of satisfaction with the manner in which information is handled within the organization. Although the OCP is relatively easy to administer and interpret, the instrument has a complex design and provides…

The Interagency Conference on Child and Family Statistics was organized around seven groups that were asked to develop specific recommendations for improving the federal statistical database on children and families. This booklet is a report on the recommendations made at the conference. The first part of the report distills and synthesizes the…

This study analyzes the effectiveness of a "guaranteed tax base" (GTB) as a reform measure designed to reduce the traditional heavy reliance of school financing on local property tax revenues and to help equalize per pupil expenditures across districts. Such measures call for matching locally raised tax dollars with state aid and…

In 1982, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) proposed to implement a new, complex design for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The major features of this design are described in "A New Design for a New Era" (Messick, Beaton, and Lord, 1983). The purpose of this document is to describe the actual implementation of…

This document is the users' guide for Version 3.1 of the Public-Use data tapes compiled by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 1983-84. The Public-Use tapes are produced to allow outside researchers access to the NAEP data. The tapes accompanying this guide contain data assessing student achievement in reading and writing at…

Piaget's model of children's conceptual learning and development was compared with Klausmeier's Conceptual Learning and Development (CLD) model in a longitudinal study. The CLD model suggests four successive levels of concept learning: (1) concrete--recognizing an object which has been encountered previously; (2) identity--recognizing a known…

The research examined innovativeness among high school social studies teachers and departments. Innovativeness is interpreted to include awareness and use of certain innovative practices (e.g., inquiry, values clarification, and community-based activities) and the "new social studies" materials, teacher participation in school decision-making…

The development and refinement of the measures of student achievement in reading and mathematics for the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study are described. The concept of reactivity to instruction is introduced: the tests used to evaluate instructional processes must be sensitive indicators of classroom learning overtime. Data collection activities…

Changes in marriage and the family from 1950-74 in five nonsocialist countries were explored. The countries selected for the study were Japan, the Netherlands, West Germany, Sweden, and the United States. Most of the data were derived from the United Nations'"Demographic Yearbook," although various original sources from the particular…

This conference was held to review the base year activities of the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS) and the First Followup Study. Planning also took place for the design of the Second Followup Study and the Cohort Study of the High School Class of 1977. The participants included invited consultants and…

The Psychometric Needs Assessment (PNA) model was designed to provide a means of describing a target population and various sub-populations contained therein. The specific purpose of such description is to provide a guide to determination of the continuing educational programming needs of professionals. Major attributes of the PNA model are the…

A project was designed to produce a broad description of current mining training programs and to evaluate their effectiveness with respect to reducing mine injuries. Aggregate training and injury data were used to evaluate the overall training effort at 300 mines as well as specific efforts in 12 categories of training course objectives. From such…

The Title I Umbrella Program provided compensatory instruction in reading, mathematics, and writing to 24,000 mildly or moderately handicapped students in New York City. The program was comprised of seven discrete components for the remediation of reading and writing skills, five after-school models, and two components for the remediation of math…

An important phenomenon of 20th century American society has been the occurrence of radical shifts in birth rate, fertility rate, and the number of births. This paper is the first of three which explore the relationship between changing proportions of youth in our society and the social, psychological, political, and economic impact of such…