These two presentations discuss the National External Diploma Program (EDP) sponsored by the American Council on Education and its relationship to the Department of Labor's Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) report and to the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System (CASAS). The first presentation focuses on the…

The National External Degree Program (EDP) of the American Council on Education is an alternative way for adults to earn a high school diploma. EDP is a competency-based, high school level assessment system that credentials mature adults who have acquired their high school level skills through their life experience. It uses materials adults have…

This collection of four articles reflects the suspicions of adult education researchers that politicians are exploiting the positive values attached in Finland to adult education, that is, increasing adult education, while imposing tight restrictions in the form of market mechanisms. "Values and Responsiveness in Adult Higher Education"…

An assessment of the educational status of children and youth attending Cleveland (Ohio) public schools was conducted through analysis of recent trends in the district and a comparison of the performance of students in the Cleveland schools with that of students in other large urban districts, Atlanta (Georgia), Boston (Massachusetts), and San…

Research on metacognition and literacy development in children and adults that was conducted during the past 15 years was reviewed to determine how metacognition can be applied to instructional approaches for adult literacy and how assessment methods may need to be modified if metacognition is to be applied successfully. Among the key findings of…

This article investigates certain modal choices made by law students when writing in an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) adjunct class, illustrating areas of concern and instances of successful development of ideas in extracts from first-year undergraduate law students' essays on a problem in tort law. The study compares judgements of teachers…

The SUCCESS program is a series of interactive computer programs designed to enhance student empowerment by allowing entering college freshmen to use computers in an environment of personal control and autonomy. To determine the effect of SUCCESS programs on students' perceived locus of control and empowerment, a study was conducted at New York's…

A study was undertaken at Illinois' Moraine Valley Community College (MVCC) to gather information on the course taking patterns, course completion rates, and retention rates between summer 1990 and spring 1993 for students who successfully completed one of eight remedial classes. Students in the sample began in one of three levels of remedial…

In October 1996, Illinois' Moraine Valley Community College (MVCC) conducted a longitudinal study of the characteristics of and outcomes experienced by students who entered the college for the first time in fall 1993, gathering data on retention rates, average attempted and earned cumulative hours, and graduation rates over 3 years. Of the 3,146…

Since 1990, California's College of the Canyons (CoC) has conducted annual surveys of graduates from its Registered Nursing (RN) program. Between 1990 and 1994, surveys were sent to 193 RN graduates, with completed questionnaires received from 124 alumni. An analysis of responses for each year revealed the following: (1) 91.7% of the respondents…

In fall 1995, a study was conducted of students who transferred from California community colleges to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to determine their academic performance and to explore the nature of their adjustment. Two transfer populations were examined: students enrolled in the Transfer Alliance Program (TAP), a program…

This study investigated the nature and validity of teacher judgments about student motivation as part of a project related to the teaching of mathematics. The study examined: (1) the degree of correlation between teachers' and students' assessments of students' motivation regarding mathematical topics; (2) the stability of teachers' and students'…

A study investigated lexical decision-making among Dutch-English bilinguals in the auditory modality. Subjects, bilinguals at three proficiency levels (intermediate, high, and near-native) were presented with 40 cognate and 40 non-cognate word pairs, a similar number of English and Dutch distractors, and a similar number of nonsense words in each…

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducts a unified set of surveys that facilitates comparison between public and private schools, school districts, and administrator data. The integrated set of surveys is called the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). A Teacher Followup Survey (TFS) is conducted a year after the SASS survey to…

This report addresses widespread beliefs about the performance of urban students, and their family and school environments. Using data from several national surveys, it compares urban students and schools with their suburban and rural counterparts on a broad range of factors, including student population and background characteristics, afterschool…