The 2004 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:04), conducted for the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), collected comprehensive data regarding how students and their families pay for postsecondary education. The primary objective of NPSAS:04 is to produce reliable national estimates of…

This report compares selected estimates from the 1996 National Household Education Survey (NHES:96) with estimates from previous NHES collections, the Current Population Survey (CPS), and other relevant data sources. The comparisons provide an indication of the reasonableness of selected NHES:96 estimates. Where discrepancies were found between…

The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B) tracks the experiences of a cohort of college graduates who received their baccalaureate degrees during the 1992-93 academic year and who were first interviewed as part of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. The experiences of this group in the areas of academic enrollment, degree…

Describes a simple, confidentiality-preserving, data-collection technique the Context-Determined, Rule-Generated, Pseudonym (CDRGP) Technique, capable of generating correlational data across multiple time-points. Experiments showed that students would respond to alcohol consumption questions using the technique and that no significant response…

The seven articles of this special issue focus on theory and research related to survey methods and whether evaluators need information that is absent from the larger survey literature. These articles reflect the view that the considerations relating to good survey research apply also to using surveys in evaluation. (SLD)

Researches the requirements for teaching English as a Second Language to senior citizens in Fairfax County, Virginia, by means of a questionnaire sent to county teachers. These people should not be separated from younger students; the instructional materials should tap their wealth of experience and focus on communicative activities in real-life…

Purpose: In this study the levels of staff turnover reported in the nursing home literature (1990-2003) are reviewed, as well as the definitions of turnover used in these prior studies. With the use of primary data collected from 354 facilities, the study addresses the various degrees of bias that result, depending on how staff turnover is defined…

This article describes a comparative study of the introduction of student portfolios in two departments of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Portfolios are designed to facilitate effective management of lifelong learning, to provide a record of achievements and to encourage…

The collection of data by face-to-face interviews and questionnaires is common and literature in these areas is extensive; but few cases are reported in which respondents have been provided with a blank audio cassette tape, interview schedule, or open-ended questionnaire items, and been invited to record their own comments and forward these to the…

This document is an inventory of public and private educational expenditure from an international perspective and sets out the concepts, definitions and procedures useful in accounting for educational expenditure. The monograph defines the field within which expenditure is to be observed; details the necessary expenditure data to be collected from…

Graduate surveys are a good way for home study schools to determine whether graduates are getting jobs in their field of training and whether courses are meeting student expectations. Although telephone surveys are more costly and time-consuming than mail surveys, they are usually more accurate. Survey response rates can be boosted to 50-60% by…

Methods and instruments used by teacher preparation institutions in conducting graduate follow-up studies were investigated, and an effort was made to determine the institutions' satisfaction with the methodology and results of their current follow-up procedures. A survey instrument was constructed that addressed eight questions related to…

The base-year survey of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) took place in spring 1988. Data on a variety of topics were obtained by questionnaires and achievement tests administered to a national probability sample of 25,000 eighth-graders. This report presents results of an examination of the quality of responses of…

This manual has been produced to familiarize data users with the procedures used for data collection and processing of the base year parent component of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) and to provide necessary documentation for using the data files. Chapter 7 and Appendix F, in particular, contain essential information…

The National Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS) of Special Education Students provides ongoing information regarding the transition of youth with disabilities from secondary school to early adulthood. The sample for the study, which began with a 1987 survey (Wave 1), involved more than 8,000 youth from the national population of secondary…