Little is known regarding the social network relationships that influence dissemination of evidence-based public health practices and policies. In public health, it is critical that evidence-based guidelines, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "Best Practices for Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs," are…

A longitudinal research study was conducted at a public university in Pennsylvania on a sample of 129 at-risk students from a state-funded program (Act 101) designed to provide support services for economically and educationally disadvantaged students. This research employed a non-experimental, ex post facto methodology to assess the impact of…

A stepwise regression technique was used to analyze assessment data while taking differences in nonschool variables across districts into account. The primary purpose of this investigation was to determine whether the inclusion of quadratic and/or interaction terms in a regression model would improve the prediction of school district average…

A Friedman Foundation report attempts to find empirical support for the contention that competition from private schools, through voucher programs, improves the effectiveness of public schools. In the first year of Ohio's new EdChoice voucher program, the report claims to have found substantial academic gains at public schools exposed to the…

As the latest in a series of studies analyzing the data reported on Tennessee's school district report cards, this paper focuses on finding a common statistical treatment to examine the impact of predictor variables on dependent variables. Investigations of the 1988-89 report card data explored the relationships among eight school district…

Student achievement data from 92 school districts in South Carolina were analyzed to determine which input variables were most likely to affect educational quality. Fourth and seventh grade samples were scrutinized to determine the effects on achievement when the shared variation between achievement and the context variables was removed. The data…

A manual for assessing the effectiveness of an elementary school , taking differences in the school's resources into account, is presented. The Pennsylvania State Board of Education established the Bureau of Educational Quality Assessment which developed a measurement package in Phase I. Field tests were conducted on grade 5 students in 1968 in…

This paper presents the latest in a series of studies examining school district report cards. The purpose was to study the relationships among factors reported on school district report cards from Nevada high schools. The 44 categories reported on Nevada's 1993-94 report card represent the study's independent variables, grouped into the areas of…

The Quality Measurement Project was established in 1956 by the New York State Education Department to determine the feasibility of measuring quality differences between schools and of identifying variables related to these differences. In the latest revision of the project, begun in 1964, 99 representative school systems, excluding the New York…

This paper extends a series of studies examining school district report cards, which began with investigations of Tennessee's report card data. Since 1988, the Texas State Board of Education has produced a report card on each school district to report district-level data. Texas district report card items were organized into student outcome…

Student achievement data from 92 school districts in South Carolina were analyzed to determine which variables were most likely to affect educational quality. Fourth and seventh grade samples were examined to determine the effects on achievement when the shared variation between achievement and the context variables was removed. The data included…

A pilot project was designed to test the efficacy of profiling welfare recipients and referring them to welfare-to-work services targeted toward their specific work histories and skills. The general framework of Michigan's Work First program was used to illustrate how profiling can be designed and administered. A profiling model was proposed that…

Florida's Statewide Assessment Program of the State Department of Education has been involved in a major effort to develop adequate strategies for releasing and publishing assessment scores for schools. One dimension of this effort has been the development of predicted or "adjusted" scores. These scores compare a school to other similar…

An empirical approach is taken to the problem of predicting effects of student financial aid programs on postsecondary enrollment rates and patterns. A model of students' enrollment decisions is developed and used to estimate the likely effects of alternative award policies for the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (BEOG) program. The analysis…

This paper presents the latest in a series of studies examining school district report cards for their usefulness planning and implementing school improvement. The 1992-93 Arkansas report cards were studied. These were similar to the report cards from Tennessee that were the subject of the initial study in that they used and reported a…