School inspections are a key component of the accountability system in many education systems, including England. The judgments and reports produced through these inspections are widely used by parents when they are choosing a school for their children. But should they be? This paper presents new evidence on this issue. We illustrate how parents…

Frustrated by the generic statements that her Year 12 students were making about sources, Jacqueline Vyrnwy-Pierce resolved to undertake a research project into how her students were approaching sources about the French Revolution. Fascinated by the research of American educational psychologist Sam Wineburg, Vyrnwy-Pierce decided to use Wineburg's…

This report urges states to participate in the State Wage Interchange System (SWIS), as it can aide states in satisfying Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) reporting requirements, and help states better understand whether former participants in workforce training and education programs are finding good jobs. SWIS is a data sharing…

Sustainable Development Goals call on Members States to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all" and sets a number of targets related to technical and vocational education and training (TVET). In order to collect input from the global TVET community, UNESCO-UNEVOC organized a…

The present article attempts to show how important and easy it is to use authentic material in the classroom. However, the teacher who copies news reports from the Internet may infringe the copyright law. The article offers a comparative analysis of copyright laws in Common Law countries and the EU countries in relation to fair use. The article…

Gathering evidence on the outcomes of any professional learning experience can be a challenging and complicated task. It involves consideration of a wide variety of perceptual and contextual issues, some obvious to education leaders and others not. Those who want to succeed in this process may find the following points helpful: (1) Always begin…

The author reports on the debate about "value added" measures of teaching which may be the most divisive topic in teacher-quality policy today. It has generated sharp-tongued exchanges in public forums, in news stories, and on editorial pages. And it has produced enough policy briefs to fell whole forests. But for most of the nation's teachers,…

In order to help students make well-informed choices, reliable college ranking systems with comparable information about higher education institutions worldwide have been welcomed by many students. Because traditional college rankings had many methodological problems, a new type of user-based ranking, called "personalized college…

Gopher and World Wide Web (WWW) are two useful Internet technologies for the composition and rhetoric classroom. Gopher software makes available a wide variety of text-based information in the Internet. A Gopher at Bowling Green State University offers many types of information. The World Wide Web, using a fairly simple markup language, is also…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) annually publishes information generated by its survey of research and development (R&D) expenditures by United States industry. These data are collected for NSF by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Other organizations also publish information on industrial R&D expenditures collected by surveys or derived…

Three online databases that provide information on regional, state, and local business news are compared in terms of publications indexed, indexing guidelines, record structure, span of coverage, currency, and availability. (CLB)

Patent information has never been so available, at such low cost, to so many people. Describes patent databases accessible on the Web (Micropatent, Source Translation and Optimization Questel-Orbit QPAT, Internet Patents/Community of Science, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office), lists their strengths and weaknesses, and recommends the best…

A practical review of seven software directories is performed by comparing indexes, entry composition, subject classifications, and coverage overlap. The bibliographic control of microcomputer software and 13 microcomputer software directories published since 1980 are highlighted. (EJS)

Discusses tasks, resources, and feedback, the three basic elements in the architecture of learning systems; analyzes these elements in relation to on-the-job learning; and discusses interventions to improve these processes and provide a positive contribution to the productivity of the organization by helping people learn. (MBR)

Highlights points to consider when choosing an Internet Service Provider. Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) and Point to Point Protocol (PPP) are compared regarding price, performance, bandwidth, speed, and technical support. Obtaining access via local, national, consumer online, and telephone-company providers is discussed. A pricing chart and…