Urges child care programs to seek accreditation from NAEYC's National Academy of Early Childhood Programs to increase program quality and provides information on the validation process. Includes information on the validation visit and the validator's role and background. Offers suggestions for preparing the director, staff, children, and families…

This paper describes the process used by the Division for Early Childhood of the Council for Exceptional Children for identifying recommended practices in early intervention/early childhood special education. Work groups in 14 areas identified practices that were then validated by a national sample of professionals and family members. Use of the…

Describes the process used in Connecticut to validate the content of associate nursing degree programs and to articulate them with baccalaureate nursing programs. (SK)

The health education profession has made significant strides in promoting quality assurance for credentialing of health educators through a combination of individual certification and program approval and accreditation mechanisms. Although the profession has widely embraced individual certification, program accreditation has not been uniformly…

In tertiary institutions in Australia, and no doubt elsewhere, there is increasing pressure for accountability. No longer are academics assumed "a priori" to be responsible and capable of self management in teaching and assessing the subjects they run. Procedures are being dictated more from the "top down". Although academics…

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) is widely used to screen university applicants for whom English is not their native language. Although the cutoff scores vary, in Ontario those with scores much lower than 550 are rarely admitted to any university. Two exceptions are the University of Western Ontario and its affiliate, Brescia…

The present study investigates whether the Early Development Instrument (Offord & Janus, 1999) measures school readiness similarly across different groups of children. We employ ordinal logistic regression to investigate differential item functioning, a method of examining measurement bias. For 40,000 children, our analysis compares groups…

The paper discusses the results of a research project based on the field testing of a course aimed at developing arithmetic problem solving skills in primary school pupils. The course was designed to incorporate e-learning techniques, including the use of ARI@ITALES authoring tools. These tools allowed the integration in the course of…

This issue of the Emergency Response and Crisis Management (ERCM) Technical Assistance Center's "ERCMExpress" promotes emergency exercises as an effective way to validate school safety plans. Simulations of emergency situations, or emergency exercises, are integral to a sound school safety plan. They offer opportunities for district and schools to…

P. A. Arbisi and Y. S. Ben-Porath (1995) originally proposed that the Infrequency Psychopathology scale, F(p), be used as the final step in an algorithm to determine the validity of a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) protocol. The current study used taxometric procedures to determine the latent structure of F(p) among…

Findings of a study that evaluated the Spencerport, New York, "More Effective Schools/Teaching Project" and examined the project's validation process are presented in this paper. The program model was based on change at the individual school level, administrator/staff collegiality, comprehensive interventions based on school culture, and…

As mandated under Title 5 of the California Administrative Code, this annual report to the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges explains the current course approval process in the colleges and summarizes approval activities in the areas of credit courses and programs and non-credit courses. First, background information is…

This report documents the five recommendations made by the Florida Education Standards Commission relating to elementary teacher preparation. The recommendations are focused on teacher education program approval as well as on certification criteria. A review of preservice preparation of elementary teachers includes a survey of elementary…

Four influential studies on school effectiveness reported by Brookover and Lezotte (1979), Edmonds and Frederiksen (1979), Phi Delta Kappa (1980), and Rutter and others (1979) are limited in their usefulness as recipes for creating effective schools by the following four issues: (1) The four studies differ in their definition of what…

A study of the Kansas Cooperative Extension's Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) was intended to determine the effectiveness of instruction provided by this federally funded program. The program endeavors to benefit low income families by improving participants' food and nutrition practices, behaviors, and food consumption…