Recent years have seen an upsurge in prevention work focused on changing the campus and community environments in which college students make decisions about alcohol and other drug (AOD) use. This approach, called "environmental management," is based on three fundamental premises: (1) Substance use problems are aggravated by a physical, social,…

A national adult literacy program was established in Nicaragua in 1979, after the Sandanista revolution, as part of a plan for socio-economic development. Program development, implementation and evaluation methods, curriculum content, educational methodology, and teacher training methods are described. (AM)

A recent community-oriented, evening education project for illiterate children residing in the rural Pune district of India is described and evaluated. Discussed are project organizations, requirement and training of staff, curriculum content, classroom equipment, course materials, and literacy results. (JA)

The Bureau of Evaluation, created by the Louisiana Department of Education, has established policies and procedures that ensure use of evaluation findings by both policymakers and program administrators. Information on its development, structure, mission, rationale, staffing, and operations is provided. (PN)

Discusses a new alcohol education program offered to all the school boards in Ontario, Canada. Describes what initially seemed to be a simple process that became a series of barriers to overcome. Includes recommendations for future projects. (Author)

Reviews some of the uses of the phone in crisis situations and describes a popular toll-free career information hotline in Virginia. Provides a profile of the mostly adult users along with a user evaluation of the service. (Author)

Describes the Master in International Business Studies (MIBS) program of the University of South Carolina, emphasizing its interdisciplinary character and the importance of its language training component. Discusses program evaluations by both students and faculty and presents a statistical summary of enrollment, retention, and degrees awarded…

Evaluation of large-scale programs is problematical because of inherent bias in assignment of treatment and control groups, resulting in serious regression artifacts even with the use of analysis of covariance designs. Nonuniformity of program implementation across sites and classrooms is also a problem. (Author/GSK)

This article comments on the previous article (Holburn, 2002), that argues misapplied approaches of person-centered planning can be remedied through scientific practices. It cautions against testing person-centered planning like a drug to establish its causal power and stresses person-centered planning as a way to improve the odds that change will…

Describes activities that industrial/organizational psychologists engage in as they seek to improve the competitiveness of organizations through effective human resource planning. Presents a model for describing human resource short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term planning. (JS)

Evaluation research, if appropriately matched to a human service program's stage of development, can help inform the decision making at each step. The developmental stages of a program, questions to be answered at each stage, and kinds of research activities pertinent to such questions are discussed. (TJH)

Discusses an in-service cross-training program designed for reference desk workers at the University of New Mexico Library. Describes the reference department and provides an overview of cross training. Highlights include training issues, a needs assessment questionnaire, program implementation, and evaluation. Four appendices provide sample…

The 9 articles of this theme issue stem from a project on alcohol and drug abuse that involved 14 projects, 10 of which began with randomized clinical trials. These papers describe implementation problems associated with experimentation in field research and the focus on ensuring internal validity. (SLD)

Describes the steps involved in writing a school technology plan and recommends the National Center for Technology Planning as a helpful resource. Topics include administrative approval, technology planning committee, use of consultants, needs assessment, equipment inventory, data analysis, finances and budget information, implementation, and…

Describes a longitudinal and ecological methodology for evaluating innovation in preschool education which features the involvement of those responsible for the innovation being evaluated. Reviews the use of this methodology in an evaluation of community nursery schools in the Strathclyde region of Scotland. (MDM)