One of the aims of the Documentation and Technical Assistance (DTA) Project is to apply educational information that has been utilized for problem solving in one organization to other settings with their own unique characteristics. Within the staff of the DTA project, the position of Technical Assistance-Documentation Linker (TA-Doc Linker) was…

This paper elaborates on the concept of "linkage"--the utilization of educational research information--as implemented by the Documentation and Technical Assistance (DTA) Project, a program designed to enhance the problem solving capacity of urban schools. The paper begins with an overview of the DTA project and discusses the educational…

This simple example demonstrates the physical significance of similarity solutions and the utility of dimensional and asymptotic analysis of partial differential equations. A procedure to determine the existence of similarity solutions is proposed and subsequently applied to transient constant-flux heat transfer. Short-time expressions follow from…

A way to assess and improve organizational effectiveness is discussed, with a focus on factors that inhibit successful organizational performance. The basic assumption is that it is easier, more accurate, and more beneficial for individuals and organizations to identify criteria of ineffectiveness (faults and weaknesses) than to identify criteria…

The key to the improvement of teacher education lies in the identification of a set of problems that legitimately can claim to be so generic and important that all who teach will be familiar with them. Such problems are what case studies portray. Case studies constitute the problemata of the professional curriculum. In the present state of…

This monograph was developed with the intention of addressing the concerns of high school mathematics teachers in Alberta (Canada) who want to base their programs on problem solving but have questions about effective and efficient ways to do so. Considered are the most basic philosophical questions, and a framework is provided to use in solving…

In 1969, the Economic Development Council and the Division of High Schools of the New York City Board of Education formed a partnership to deal with problems in inner city schools. The result of that partnership was the High School Self-Renewal Program. The program, first implemented in two inner city high schools, was designed in such a way that…

The High School Self-Renewal Program is a multiphase program designed to facilitate individual school improvement. In this document the various stages of the Renewal process, as adopted by Bay Ridge High School, New York, are outlined. Both cabinet level and school level processes are described. The cabinet level entry stage was characterized by…

The Structured Planning and Debugging Editor (SPADE) is a new kind of interactive programming environment in which computer programs are generated by explicitly articulating planning decisions. The design of SPADE is based upon the development of a grammar of plans from a taxonomy of basic planning techniques. The utility of this approach to…

A unified theory of planning and debugging is explored by designing a problem solving program called PATN. PATN uses an augmented transition network (ATN) to represent a broad range of planning techniques, including identification, decomposition, and reformulation. (The ATN is a simple yet powerful formalism which has been effectively utilized in…

In this narrative portion of a slide presentation, the Rural Network of the Teachers' Centers Exchange is introduced and described. The Network was begun in 1977 and serves to encourage and facilitate interaction among member teacher centers through conferences and workparties, and by correspondence and visits. Through the Network, the centers…

Using simulated reference questions and a search exercise in a standardized list of subject headings, this test assesses several major skills of reference librarians: question analysis, selection of appropriate source, actual use of the source, and selection of appropriate subject terms. It also provides a means of determining the attitudes of…

Neither the scientific nor the humanistic research paradigm is completely appropriate for the education field. Human service situations yield research results that are tentative descriptions or generalizations due to continuous change. An action research paradigm should reflect the ongoing need of the subjects to act without waiting for research…

The relationship between the content and the context of curriculum was explored by applying basic concepts and approaches from the fields of policy analysis and organization theory. A chronology of the policy formation stage in which the University of Iowa developed its recommendations for curriculum revision is presented. The format indicates…

Two teams, each comprised of teachers, a researcher, and a trainer/developer spent fifteen and a half months implementing the Interactive Research and Development on Teaching (IR&DT) strategy, a specialized educational research medthodology stressing interactive rather than linear communication between teachers and researchers. These teams are…