Reports on the case of a university student studying English as a Second Language who disliked the informal writing of dialogue journals. Implications from the case suggest the need for researchers and practitioners to consider students' perspectives when employing nontraditional writing assignments. (53 references) (Author/CK)

Conditions influencing conduct and impact of state-level program evaluation are explored. A model is offered as a guide for assessing conduct and impact, and its use is demonstrated by a case study contrasting the approaches of two states examining an issue raised by the Federal Health Care Financing Agency. (SLD)

Increased demands for colleges and universities to engage in outcomes assessment for accountability purposes have accelerated the need to bridge the gap between higher education practice and the fields of measurement, assessment, and evaluation. The "Handbook on Measurement, Assessment, and Evaluation in Higher Education" provides higher…

The training of researchers in the educational technology field has continued in the traditional vein of the experimental paradigm. This document describes a workshop presented to balance that training and to prepare students to undertake research in a non-traditional way. The workshop aimed to acquaint students with non-causal naturalistic…

The Center for Educational Research and Evaluation of the University of North Carolina (Greensboro) has been contracted to propose standards, indicators of quality, data collection procedures, and instruments for the evaluation of Georgia public schools mandated by the state legislature. The development of these standards and indicators is…

This paper examines the changing demographics of American society and the impact of these changes on higher education. Discussions include a historical background of early American demography, the building and expansion of the population base, and census changes through various generations of the baby boom years and beyond. Next, the report…

An environmental scanning system was developed by the admissions office of a graduate school of management in a small southeastern university. The school's strategic planning committee felt that it would be beneficial to acquire information concerning issues, trends, and possible events that might impact upon the school in the future and to…

A project was undertaken to explore the prospects of conducting employer followup surveys concerning the graduates of a selected vocational program and to devise a procedure that would categorize the small number of employers to be sampled in such a way that useful data for possible program change could be obtained and analyzed. During the…

Seven potentially useful maxims from the field of human information processing are proposed that may help institutional researchers prepare and present information for higher education decision-makers. The maxims, which are based on research and theory about how people cognitively process information, are as follows: (1) more may not be better;…

This report summarizes the work of the Georgia Express project staff and the five task teams that provided research services to the Georgia Task Force on Adult Education. (The purpose of the Task Force was to review Georgia Adult Education's current goals, objectives, and procedures and to make recommendations for program improvement.) The report…

This paper defines a conceptual model for institutional research in the community college and identifies sources of information, programs, and services that provide data necessary for implementation of the model. The model contains four specific subsystems: goal setting, program development, program review, and cost effectiveness. Each subsystem…

Educational indicators are a subset of social indicators. They are consistently measurable, conceptually based, policy relevant, and related to the educational process. They can be used to compare educational units, monitor change, test goals, and predict the effects of policy changes. Use of educational indicators requires identification of the…

The basis for the assessment process in this project is that structured situations within curriculum areas will yield vocational information (skill and behavioral) that has a direct and indirect relationship to occupational areas in the world of work. Thus, with the assistance of school assessment teams, seven situations were identified and…

This document reports the Center's current thinking about PPBS and data-based educational planning. In the introduction, PPBS is defined, the usual conceptualization of PPBS is outlined, current pressure to adopt PPBS in public education is discussed, and current efforts at such implementation are reviewed. The second part deals with basic…

In the first part of this paper, estimates of present values or rates of return to education for women on lifetime earnings have been calculated. Subsequently, returns to education for women which derive from their husband's income and their family income are examined. Finally, some implications of the results are discussed. In the first section,…