In 1987, the Oregon Legislature passed House Bill 2020, the School Improvement and Professional Development Program. Designed to encourage innovation and professional development in a select number of Oregon schools, this act was intended to upgrade educational quality and create models for other state schools. Rather than evaluating program…

Drawing from a review of the literature, existing studies of accountability in other states, and the experiences of four California community colleges that are developing local accountability systems, this six-part guide offers ideas and suggestions for community college educators who wish to design accountability systems that will increase…

A project was conducted to develop an integrated basic skills instructional program in an education service cooperative to serve grades 7-12 vocational students in 13 rural school districts in Arkansas (Grant and Jefferson counties) as a follow-up to the vocational assessment process. The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) chose the Arkansas…

The techniques and accompanying problems of collecting data on interventions are explored. As a result of the analyses of two previous studies (Colorado and Kentucky Ethnographic Studies, 1979; and Texas, 1981) a hybrid-method of documenting interventions was developed for use in the Principal-Teacher Interaction Study (PTI). This paper traces the…

Freshman botany students, graduate students, and student library assistants participated in a study to determine the effectiveness of a self-paced workbook on learning library skills in searching science literature and to determine staff and funding requirements to run larger scale instructional programs. The botany students comprised four groups.…

Project RE:LEARNING failed to gain state-agency support because there was no widespread sense of crisis in Delaware to prompt restructuring, no shared conviction that schools needed dramatic changes. The Delaware story should caution systemic reformers to "front load" their energy and publicize serious problems. It takes more than a…

Designing, developing, and implementing an electronic document management system involves preparation. Areas to consider when facilitating technological change include staff input and business and customer needs and wants. Further discussion addresses value assessment of document type, providing a pilot system for staff experiment and practice,…

Describes the development of a program in Connecticut that combined Web-based training with peer mentorship to improve technology integration in K-12 classrooms. Topics include prerequisites; program implementation; a nine-month pilot study; formative evaluation; mentor survey; summative evaluation; and the feasibility of this type of program for…

Implementing any new service or technology can require a process of trial and error. Often, it is useful to introduce the service as a pilot project, so that the staffing issues and technical details can be worked out prior to fullscale implementation. This is especially important at times when staffing and/or budgetary circumstances are…

This paper reports on a study that examined skill standards pilot programs to identify lessons learned in the selection and involvement of representatives from the various stakeholder communities and the potential for sustaining the efforts of the pilot programs. Data were gathered through structured conversations with staff and committee members…

A minicourse pilot project was designed by the Massachusetts Department of Education to meet the staff training and development needs of workplace educators in the National Workplace Literacy Program. During the course, various activities and group configurations were used to help teachers apply modeled approaches to their own teaching contexts,…

This evaluation of the first-year elementary school implementation of Boston's pilot "controlled choice" student assignment plan found that very little had been accomplished in planning for school improvement and that future desegregation compliance hinges on key decisions about secondary and bilingual education, and the empowerment of…

In April of 1982, the German Federal Armed Forces initiated the first empirical pilot project in the area of computerized adaptive testing (CAT). The configuration of hardware, psychological section, and physiological section is discussed, as well as two current problems (data transfer from the TEST 2000 microcomputer to a large sized computer for…

In 1985-86, the Albuquerque (New Mexico) Public Schools, through Chapter 1 funding, entered the final year of a 3-year pilot of Early Learning Programs (ELPs) at four sites in the district: (1) Lavaland; (2) Longfellow; (3) Tomasita; and (4) Alamosa. Four- and five-year-old children (N=272) participated in the pilot program. Seventy-five percent…

This resource guide contains a selection of examples and exhibits concerning different aspects of planning for inservice teacher education. The exhibits were taken from four pilot studies developed by the Teacher Corps. The major activities described are group problem solving, establishment of guidelines for development of an inservice program,…