Background: Over the past 20 years or so policy and practice on the education of children with special educational needs (SEN) has been aimed at placing increasing numbers of children in a mainstream school environment. Although this policy has been supported in principle by many teachers, parents and local authority officers, there has been much…

Education, it seems, is increasingly driven by the numbers. Whether it is measuring student performance or a school district's ability to balance the books, one will find data out there about it. So much data, in fact, that it is difficult to sort through all the numbers to get the needed information. This article describes California's Ed-Data…

How do you judge the accuracy, reliability, and completeness of an electronic or online database? What measures do publishers and distributors employ to ensure that quality standards are met? Who is responsible for what part of the process? Eighteen contributors address these questions and more in their discussion of an important issue in today's…

This paper provides a brief description of Hyper-G, the first second-generation hypermedia system. The first section identifies problems with first generation hypermedia systems. The following sections discuss the new concepts that are implemented in Hyper-G, including user accounts and billing, structuring of data, caching and replication, native…

This digest identifies Internet resources of particular interest to the educational assessment community. Gopher sites and web sites are identified and discussed for the following organizations and institutions: (1) American Educational Research Association; (2) American Evaluation Association; (3) Arizona State University College of Education;…

This digest describes datasets of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) that are related to rural education, discusses potential uses of NCES data, and offers practical tips for accessing these data. NCES has primarily two types of data; population data on the school universe and national surveys. Two population databases are the…

Formerly the "Directory of ERIC Information Service Providers," this directory lists 1,029 organizations that provide individuals with access to the ERIC database and related resources. It is designed to help users quickly locate organizations that offer ERIC resources and related services within a geographically short distance, and is…

This manual is designed to accompany a set of 31 CD-ROM discs. Disc 1 contains a database of some 8,300 bibliographic records representing publications of the OERI-supported National Research and Development (R&D) Centers acquired and processed by ERIC across the 30-year period 1966-1997. Discs 2-31 contain digitized page images of the full…

The research on response facilitation factors in mail surveys is reviewed, and background is developed to enable the comparison of results obtained by two analytic approaches, a descriptive analysis and a meta-analysis, using the same set of studies. Specific criteria for sample and methodology were applied to studies extracted from four CD-ROM…

This study examines precision and recall for title and keyword searches performed in the "FirstSearch" WorldCat database when keywords are used with and without adjacency of terms specified. A random sample of 68 titles in economics were searched in the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) Online Union Catalog in order to obtain their…

This document provides information on two services established on the Internet by the National Center on Adult Literacy (NCAL): electronic mail (e-mail) communication with NCAL and a Gopher server that makes it possible to access and download information, documents, and software relevant to adult literacy. A recent "NCAL Connections" article,…

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducts a variety of surveys on elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education. Recently an Integrated Sampling Team has been formed to explore the possible gains from a greater integration of these surveys and from new technology. The team will investigate the feasibility and desirability…

Ten commonly held misconceptions about the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) information system are presented together with a brief discussion of the facts for each one. These factual responses provide the following overview of the ERIC system. ERIC is a national information system that includes 16 clearinghouses and four support…

This digest offers tips for both new and experienced users of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database. It describes ERIC as a federally funded, nationwide information network providing access to papers, curriculum and teaching guides, conference proceedings, literature reviews, curricular materials, and journal articles in the…

This participant's guide is intended to be used in a one-day workshop for college/university staff on changes in requirements for schools disbursing federally supported student financial aid under the reauthorized Higher Education Act. The materials are in a workbook format and include copies of workshop display materials, space for notes, case…