The Forum Guide to Early Warning Systems provides information and best practices to help education agencies plan, develop, implement, and use an early warning system in their agency to inform interventions that improve student outcomes. The document includes a review of early warning systems and their use in education agencies and explains the…

At the heart of the effort to enact and scale up successful school reforms is the need for more robust links between research and practice. One promising approach is design development, a methodology widely used in other fields and only recently adapted to education, which offers a disciplined process for identifying practical problems, assessing…

The author had been an elementary administrator for about nine years when she first heard about the SAM (School Administration Manager) project. SAM is a national pilot project funded by The Wallace foundation to better understand how principals spend their time and to develop strategies to help principals focus more of their time on teaching and…

Discusses results of a survey of trainers in midwest business and industry to identify the different data collection methods they used to determine job and task training needs as well as organizational and individual training needs within their organizations. (MBR)

This guide for pupil personnel administrators, provides procedures, timelines, resources, and sample statistical tables for conducting a needs assessment to meet the Illinois State Board of Education requirement. Basic recommendation procedures for conducting a pupil personnel services (PPS) needs assessment are identified as follows: (1) organize…

This article discusses the importance of conducting an initial needs assessment as part of gifted program development. The paper describes data collection concerning the general student body, gifted population, school district personnel, school and school district, physical setting, economic factors, community, and national and state gifted…

The purpose of this guide is to help school administrators, faculty, or other involved persons to measure a school's climate. Factors that create the climate, or total ambience of a school, include relationships of all within the school community, feelings and opinions about personal development and learning goals, and feelings and attitudes about…

The manual is intended to help administrators evaluate special education programs. Information is organized according to 11 training activities designed for a one day inservice session. Introductory information reviews the purposes of training, and provides suggestions for trainers in planning, conducting, and following up the session. Activities…

To determine the extent to which states are able to assess their provision of services to typically underserved populations, this study interviewed 16 Part H (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) state coordinators. Major findings indicated: (1) six states identified their rural population as most underserved and six identified one or more…

The purpose of this document is to share various approaches used by federal agencies to assess needs and measure training effectiveness. The emphasis in the descriptions is on the evaluation process rather than on the results. One program was evaluated by employing return-on-investment (ROI) data and using volunteer line personnel who conducted…

The purpose of this guide is to provide local Head Start program decision-makers with a tool that will be useful in developing needs assessments appropriate to their communities, whether urban or rural. Although the guide focused on community needs assessments for planning mainstream services for children with handicapping conditions, its…

Provides a detailed guide to preparing library budgets and describes several types of budgets. Steps to preparing a final document are outlined, including identifying objectives, assessing and prioritizing needs, data collection and analysis, presentation to the funding agency, and evaluation and monitoring of the final budget. (CLB)

Presents methods used to justify the need for additional library resources or services to school administrators based on the library's role in meeting educational objectives. Suggestions for gathering data for the assessment of library needs and presenting the results to administrators are provided. (CLB)

Needs assessment, a procedure for obtaining and analyzing information for use in decision-making, consists of identifying the concerns of faculty, staff, parents, students, and community, and validating these concerns (which only then become "needs") by means of information derived from surveys and school records. The Worldwide Needs…

This report offers a perspective on state supply and demand data collection efforts concerning special education personnel. The report includes: (1) an overview of federal data requirements; (2) national data on special education and related services personnel as reported in the U.S. Department of Education's "Fifteenth Annual Report to Congress…