Presents nine strategies for gathering information on training effectiveness via: telephone, e-mail, mail-in survey, postcards, online bulletin board, a visit to the human resources department, the strategic plan, focus group, and end-of-course evaluations. (AEF)

In 1997, Edmonton Public Schools (Alberta, Canada) began developing a process to engage teachers in curriculum alignment with a view to improving student achievement. Ten principles guiding the curriculum alignment framework are listed, followed by first-year results and factors that led to the framework's success. (CDS)

Reports on a growing movement to document and attack gender discrimination at institutions of higher education following an internal study that documented gender bias against women in the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stresses the value of such broad studies over individual complaints of discrimination. (DB)

Discusses associations between levels of service point use, population information and library inputs, based on data from two London boroughs in respect of individual static service points. Outlines methods of deriving catchment area data using membership information or postcode data from a user survey. Describes a method for librarians seeking to…

Includes task force recommendations on the role of the International Council for Adult Education in monitoring achievement of adult education objectives, qualitative and quantitative indicators, and diverse data collection methods. Eleven workshop reports discuss progress on adult education policy advocacy, documentation, health care reform,…

The Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are promoting various "citizen science" projects in which amateur naturalists make local observations of birds, butterflies, or natural phenomena and report their observations to interactive databases on the World Wide Web. Events such as the Great Backyard Bird Count motivate people…

Explores the history of the federal Adoption Incentive Program, the first federal child welfare outcome-based incentive program to rely solely on administrative data; discusses the program in the context of other federal child welfare incentive programs. Considers the use of data to project program utilization and costs, set baselines for the…

Examined placement stability among a cohort of children in out-of-home care. Found that children in kinship care, regardless of age, had fewer placement moves than those in nonkinship care. Children who had more than one placement move during their first year were more likely to experience placement instability in long-term out-of-home care. (JPB)

Using interviews and classroom observations, this study examined one teacher's modification of curriculum-based measurement (CBM) of oral reading skills in her fourth grade general education classroom. The teacher made use of both qualitative and quantitative information. Three key elements in this teacher's CBM practice are highlighted:…

Nursing home medical-record documentation of daily-care occurrence may be inaccurate, and information is not documented about important quality-of-life domains. The inadequacy of medical record data creates a barrier to improving care quality, because it supports an illusion of care consistent with regulations, which reduces the motivation and…

This project determined asthma prevalence in a large school district, absentee rates, and potential effects of school nurse case management for student asthma over three years. Data were derived from an asthma tracking tool used by nurses in one school district for every student reported as having asthma by their parent. School nurses began…

The Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project includes training elementary and secondary teachers. This training component, Ecology Explorers (EE), prepares teachers in grades 4 through 12 to teach about ecological principles and processes. The EE pedagogy employs scientific inquiry and data collection protocols.…

After 25 years of evolution of technology resources in schools, your leadership team, board of education and local community have finally gotten the message that these tools are here to stay and belong in every classroom for student access. A budget has been appropriated, equipment purchased, professional development completed and new curriculum…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act requirement that states prepare and disseminate an annual state report card became effective at the beginning of the 2002-03 school year. Each state agency must also ensure that each local district collects appropriate data, both at the district level and for each school, and includes such data in its annual…

One of the most beneficial uses for technology in the science classroom is data manipulation. During labs and other learning experiences, students can quickly put the data they collect into spreadsheets or databases. Then they can make comparisons, create graphs, draw conclusions, sort the data in new ways, and, ultimately, give their data…