Presents a model for needs assessment in school programs. The approach collects data from personal interviews with students, parents, community members, and professional staff; from an analysis of the existing curriculum; and from an in-depth student profile. (Author/WD)

A model is presented for conducting follow-up studies of preservice and inservice teacher training. (JD)

Special emphasis is given to the kinds of control that can be exercised over initial status, including the use of proxy input data. A rationale for the classification scheme is developed, based on (1) three one-shot, one cross-sectional, and two longitudinal data types and (2) two types of referencing: criterion referencing and norm referencing.…

A conceptual model of quality of life, developed at the Centre for Health Promotion at the University of Toronto (Canada), and associated instrumentation for collecting data from persons with developmental disabilities are presented. Results from a preliminary study with 41 participants support the reliability and validity of the model's…

Highlights the development of a data management system to facilitate service delivery by the career planning and placement department at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Recounts the development of the system, providing the context for data management and describing the issues associated with building and implementing a data model, and the…

Presents a framework to describe typical constraints that program evaluators face. The framework encompasses the usual evaluation costs and other factors that impede data collection or the implementation of strong evaluation designs. These are characterized as internal/substantive or external/political. (SLD)

This two-part article combines a comprehensive account of a probabilistic model of retrieval with new systematic experiments on TREC (Text Retrieval Conferences) Program material. Part 1 covers the foundations and the model development for document collection and relevance data, along with the test apparatus. Data and results tables for both parts…

A comprehensive account of a probabilistic model of retrieval with new systematic experiments on TREC (Text Retrieval Conferences) Program material. Part 2 covers the further development of the model, with testing, and briefly considers other environment conditions and tasks, model training, concluding with comparisons with other approaches and an…

The analysis of discrete dyadic sequential behavior and, in particular, the problem of forecasting future behavior from current and past behavior in such data is the main theme of the present article. We propose to use multivariate multinomial logit models and the potential of which will be demonstrated with data on Imagery play therapy. In such a…

In this article, the author comments on an article by Dunn, Kadane, and Garrow, "Comparing Harm Done by Mobility and Class Absence: Missing Students and Missing Data." He believes the research reported in that article should serve as a model for future applications of Bayesian methods in important educational research problems. The author lauds…

The 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Optics Velley Kingdom Plaza Hotel, Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. This years conference features two invited talks by: Dr. Jie Tang, Associate Professor with the Department of Computer…

As a growing number of schools and districts are found to be underperforming under the requirements of NCLB, school and district administrators are increasingly searching for research-based whole school improvement programs, including comprehensive school reform (CSR) models and education service providers (ESPs), in order to create dramatic…

Introduction: Activity theory, developed in the USSR as a Marxist alternative to Western psychology, has been applied widely in educational studies and increasingly in human-computer interaction research. Argument: The key elements of activity theory, Motivation, Goal, Activity, Tools, Object, Outcome, Rules, Community and Division of labour are…

This chapter discusses current methods of formative evaluation and suggests that these methods themselves need to be subjected to more critical research and evaluation in order to provide them with a more scientific base. Topics addressed include problems and methods associated with data gathering, evaluation designs, number of subjects available,…

Evaluation of a middle school humanities program is the focus of this report. It explains how to identify information needs and set priorities, how to obtain information from a variety of sources, and what to do with the data collected in terms of formulating recommendations for the school board. The variety of evaluation approaches presented are…