To learn more about the Regional Educational Service Agencies (RESA), Research for Better Schools initiated a multi-year study of RESAs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. This report specifically describes local educators' perceptions about RESA services and the content areas in which RESAs offered help. It also suggests how successful service…

One of a series of publications to assist Australian secondary school instructors in teaching social studies skills, this booklet introduces students to methods of using the library, media, and local community for data collection. Ten chapters provide a wide variety of activities for using the library; studying the local community; using street…

While gathering the 1980 census, the U.S. Census Bureau tried several methods of improving its training of census interviewers. This paper covers three general areas of that experiment. First, it reviews bureau efforts to improve verbatim training and presents selected results from an alternative training experiment conducted in the 1980 census.…

Many studies of educational outcomes collect data on the socioeconomic characteristics of parents from students, and not from the parents themselves. Nevertheless, students are often fallible informants of parental status factors. A series of distinct hierarchical measurement models were used to examine the structure of errors in high school…

Introduction: Information literacy education is central for students as a building block for functioning citizenship in an information rich world. To support students' development of information skills we need an awareness of underlying factors behind information seeking habits. This article will discuss whether differences in middle and high…

This report builds on and extends existent research on population invariance to new tests and issues. The authors lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of the use of population invariance measures in a wide variety of practical contexts. The invariance of linear, equipercentile and IRT equating methods are examined using data from five…

This report documents the activities of the first year of a two-year project to design and conduct a data collection effort focused on postsecondary occupational education delivery. Chapter 1 is an introduction. Chapter 2 contains a description of the key issues that will be addressed by the data collection effort and justification for narrowing…

An examination is presented of the progress of Maryland's Joint Coordinating Committee for Occupational Education Programs in developing a systematic procedure for the evaluation of the quality of occupational programs in Maryland's community colleges. After presenting the 1976 resolution which established the joint committee, the fiscal year 1987…

Documentation is provided to aid users of a file that contains data on financial aid and school costs for a sample of students in the 1985-86 school year. Each record contains information from the school registrar's office, from the student financial aid office record, and from a questionnaire completed by students. There are 3,774 records on the…

Specific issues to be resolved, prior to including federal programs information on school and school district universe files, are identified and discussed as part of the Education Data Improvement Project of the Council of Chief State School Officers. Goals of this Project are to describe state collection of data elements currently in the common…

Administering measures of students' ethical orientation at various points in the education of business students would be helpful in determining the affective impact of the curriculum. Procedures for eliminating item bias and maximizing the validity and reliability of such measures are discussed and illustrated through actual data collected in the…

A step-by-step approach is provided for developing an environmental scanning system for colleges and universities to assist them in planning for the future. The objectives of such a system are to detect social, scientific, economic, technical, and political interactions important to the organization; define potential threats and opportunities from…

In April 1990, the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges and the National Center for Academic Achievement and Transfer conducted a national survey of 1,366 regionally accredited, degree-granting, two-year public and private colleges to identify practices used to foster and encourage student transfer to senior institutions.…

The 'rural' definitions applied by the Federal Government, especially by two data-gathering agencies, the Bureau of the Census and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), emphasize different dimensions of the concept, and delineate the rural-urban continuum in different ways. This report discusses the inconsistency of curent "rural"…

The sampling procedures and results of data collection are documented for the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) base-year survey of eighth graders, which was conducted during the winter, spring, and summer of 1988. This abridged version of the 1989 contractor report does not report any information that could violate the…