A process for evaluating the effectiveness of educational organizations, with a focus on accountability, is described. An evaluation of 15 pilot-test school districts in the Arizona Career Ladder Project reveals the existence of a major discrepancy between meeting program requirements and achieving program success. A theoretical model of…

An instructional system that is both efficient and effective should present information so that it is easily processed by learners and so that the cognitive structures resulting from instruction correspond to the structure of the content to be learned. This paper presents a discussion of methods for describing content structure and cognitive…

Three stages of teacher education are examined: preservice; the induction phase, defined as the first few years prior to the tenure decision; and inservice training. It is noted that there is often an incongruity between the real purpose of preservice students and that of their teachers in a teacher education system. Preservice students going…

In its most general sense, a system is a group of components integrated to accomplish a purpose. The heart of an educational system is the instructional system. An instructional system is an integrated set of media, equipment, methods, and personnel performing efficiently those functions required to accomplish one or more learning objectives. An…

The three main approaches to educational planning are social demand, manpower forecasting, and cost benefit. The social demand approach, useful only for reference purposes, attempts to forecast and assess consumer demand for education. Manpower forecasting tries to insure an output of the educational system to meet future economic demands, but…

A program structure relates objectives and activities by identifying and measuring objectives (including all activities) and by allowing for growth. The process of program structuring categorizes the activities of education into programs according to their contribution to meeting education objectives and provides a format for the program budget.…

The major thesis of this paper is that black colleges and universities are fundamental parts of the overall American society, which is fraught with change, oppression, chaos, and post-industrial problems; therefore, it contends, the survival of these minority institutions depends upon their keeping pace with today's technological trends. Based on…

This document is volume 4 of a four-volume report which describes the components of the Health Services Mobility Study (HSMS) method of task analysis, job ladder design, and curriculum development. Divided into three chapters, volume 4 is a manual for using HSMS task data and analysis results to develop curriculum objectives, guidelines, and…

Evaluating alternatives provides both the reason for and the technique of program budgeting for educational planning. The activities demanded by the program budgeting system allow systematic choosing of a preferred course of action. Within this system, alternatives are considered in the context of all other programs. This document presents…

This pamphlet presents a general description of the systems approach as applied to education, and gives verbal and mathematical model examples of its application in educational administration. The basic aims of the systems approach are to (1) identify major objectives of a program plan, (2) define programs that can effect the planned goals, (3)…

Under the present practices, the objectives and activities of socially oriented projects have rarely been specified with enough clarity and concreteness. Alternatives have been insufficiently presented for consideration by top management. In a number of cases, the future costs of present decisions have not been laid out systematically enough and…

Canada's national educational system elicits diverse curricular demands and requires discreet, sensitive responses. In spite of perennial funding shortfalls, Canada's schools have been remarkably successful in meeting those demands. During and after the 1960s, educational change came as a result of two very strong sets of expectations. One broad…

ON THE PREMISE THAT A KNOWLEDGE OF NUCLEAR SCIENCE IS ESSENTIAL FOR INTELLIGENT DECISION-MAKING REGARDING ITS USES, THE NUCLEAR SCIENCE CURRICULUM PROJECT WAS DEVELOPED. ITS OBJECTIVE IS TO PROVIDE A PROGRAM THAT CAN BE EFFECTIVELY USED IN SCIENCE CLASSES TO PROVIDE AN UNDERSTANDING OF NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ITS IMPACT ON SOCIETY. THOUGH TEACHER…

This paper outlines and discusses the nature of the systems approach to teacher education in foreign languages. The following topics are discussed: (1) purpose of the system, (2) content of the teacher preparation program, (3) development of objectives, (4) academic foundations-objectives, (5) foreign language-culture, (6) systems approach…

The purpose of this module is to help educators learn how to break down a goal into its directly observable component parts. These parts of the goal can then be used as evaluative criteria for measuring accomplishment of the goal. The procedure is a new method for operationally defining goals and is a specific application of a general method…