During teacher-administered tryouts of an instructional program, staff observations of classroom lessons are an important data source for making later revisions. However, such data are often unavailable when needed because of a lack of systematic procedures for data collection and documentation. This paper suggests certain procedures for reporting…

Observational findings regarding differentiated child behavior in Follow Through classrooms for the year 1971 are presented. The interactional behavior of three groups of elementary school children from different classroom settings (Bank Street School for Children, an open classroom approach; Bank Street Follow Through, an open classroom approach;…

The idea that nontraditional educational programs should be evaluated according to criteria defined by the theories behind the program is applied to an evaluation of a Planned Variation-Project Follow-Through program. Classroom observation was used to study adult-child interactions. (GDC)

The nature of on-going instructional processes and pupil experiences were studied in two classes of a British infant school. Using PROSE (Personal Record of School Experience) as the primary observation instrument, 24 children, aged five through seven years, equally divided as to sex, were observed during seven days. A total of 9 cycles and 45…

The major instrument employed in the evaluation of the functioning of the bilingual mini-school was an observation schema developed by the evaluators over a two year period. The major purpose of the observation scale was to develop a dynamic feedback system or process. Second, it was felt that it was important to obtain a direct measure of the…

An observational monitoring system is described for evaluating preschool programs and providing feedback to relatively untrained caregivers in order to encourage program improvement in the social and cognitive realms. The system utilizes a simple one page observation form for teachers and children detailing interaction and type of activity. Data…

The first phase of a study to assess York County's new open plan schools is reported in this document. The study focused on the behavioral outcomes for students exposed to the open plan schools' programs. Three control county elementary schools were matched with the four open plan schools on age, socioeconomic conditions in attendance areas, and…

A rationale is presented for both investigating the context of educational organizations and building in a program renewal capacity as an essential operational component of every such organization. The findings of several program evaluation studies conducted at the University of Alberta's Faculty of Education are reviewed. These studies were…

Designed by the Ilinois Bilingual Evaluation Center as a pilot project, the purpose of this study was to explore the process or nature of events in a bilingual classroom and to investigate the feasibility of using observational techniques to examine this process in an evaluation context. The subjects for the study were three children of Spanish…

This document describes the development of an observation instrument which could provide an objective record of the content of the learning environment in the early childhood classroom. A team of early childhood specialists explored the critical dimensions of the preschool experience and developed a series of descriptive categories in terms of…

During the report period the researchers were primarily engaged in the spring data collection and in drawing up the outlines of the 1971-72 and 1972-73 phases of the study. This activity involved a great deal of conceptualization and inspection of raw data, toward the end of clarifying the theoretical frame of reference and the purpose and…

The Columbia Classroom Environments Project (CCEP) report discusses a number of questions about a set of dimensions of learning and development as well as the instruments the project was developing for the analysis of behavior in learning environments. Joseph C. Grannis examines The Argument, Assumptions, Definitions, Hypothesis; Rochelle Mayer…

This report is organized into seven chapters. Chapter One, an Introduction by Joseph C. Grannis, includes the most relevant sections of the proposal made by the Columbia Classroom Environments Project (CCEP) to Project Follow Through in August 1970. Chapter Two is an Analysis of the Child Behavior Stream Observations from the Spring 1971 Study of…

The study reported in the first part had two major goals: the construction of a pupil role interview schedule and the use of this interview to measure the influence of different programs in Project Follow Through on pupil role development. The second part of this report concerns a content analysis done by the Columbia Classroom Environments…

The application of behavior modification procedures by Head Start teachers in the classroom and the remedial application of programmed instructions to children with preacademic deficiencies were studied in 11 classrooms located in three Kansas towns--Lawrence, Topeka, and Kansas City. Data were collected throughout the 1968-1969 year on both the…