Elements of the Nursing Minimum Data Set (NMDS) were collected from 188 medical records in South Dakota acute care facilities. NMDS provided a description of nursing practice and enabled comparison among facilities and patients. Cost and time considerations in using the NMDS were identified. (SK)

Recommends six steps school districts should follow to effectively use data collection instruments to improve school safety: Survey each school respondent group, organize a safe schools action team, obtain additional information, conduct a safe schools analysis and develop recommendations, take action. Describes advantages collecting school safety…

Despite the Hate Crime Statistics Act, signed into law in 1990 to make hate crimes a federal offense, these types of crimes appear to be continuing in the new millennium. Provides hate crime statistics for 1996-98, presents theories on the cause and spread of hate, asserts that a general profile of those with a propensity to act on hate can be…

To obtain earnings data for the Occupational Outlook Handbook, economists primarily use the Current Population Survey. Other sources include the Occupational Compensation Survey and surveys of professional, industry, and educational associations, and unions. Interviews are used if no survey data exist. (JOW)

Examines current trends in data collection and information use in human services organizations. Describes issues for managers who are planning information systems, including practitioner resistance to automation. Proposes that conceptual integration of agendas for human services automation, practice evaluation, and service effectiveness enables…

Provides an overview of content analysis, a powerful data reduction technique. It is a systematic, replicable technique for compressing many words of text into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding. The technique extends far beyond simple word frequency counts, but requires careful definition of categories. (SLD)

Questionnaire data have many important uses, but is laborious for the subjects to provide. EDUFORM tries to alleviate this problem by enabling the creation of adaptive online questionnaires. The idea is to build a probabilistic model from previously gathered data, and employ it for predicting the profiles of new users on the basis of a subset of…

Using the evaluation work on the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Unleashing Resources Initiative as an example, in this article we explicate a general four-step model appropriate for multilevel evaluation alignment. We review the relevant literature, argue for the need for evaluation alignment in a multilevel context, explain the four-step model,…

Thirty years after the first national estimates of intimate partner violence were published, the field has reached such a level of maturity that complex questions can be posed and sophisticated research studies can be designed to answer them. Out of this body of research, one of the most important things that researchers have learned is that…

Data-based decision making has been the mantra of the school reform movement since the late 1980s, but California does not yet have an effective system for collecting and using vital school information. California has taken a number of steps to address this shortcoming. These include the Public School Accountability Act of 1999 and Senate bills…

In 12 audio taped sessions, three kindergarten children engaged algebra in a teaching for understanding, thematic project. Toni, Asa, and Cornel had one-on-one lessons dealing with simple natural numbers, patterns, and relationships. Along the way, each child studied one of Toni Morrison's Who's got game books to explore repetition patterns in…

This practice brief is one of a series highlighting key practices undertaken by some of the many successful Building Engagement and Attainment for Minority Students (BEAMS) schools during the project's five years of data collection and action plan implementation. These practice briefs accompany a monograph that details the process BEAMS…

Prevention coordinators have an important role on campus. To be effective, they must demonstrate the right balance of accurate information, clear strategy, and open collaboration with others. A strong prevention program requires understanding the problem, identifying the contributing factors, taking action to intervene, and then evaluating to see…

Teaching students to collect data to answer questions is an important life skill that will serve them well throughout their adult lives. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the implementation of an action research project in a fifth grade resource classroom. Students with mild disabilities were taught how to conduct surveys using three…

This study aimed at exploring the practices and beliefs physics teachers have about introducing reform-based instruction into the physics class. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews held with 11 experienced physics teachers. The results revealed that the teachers occasionally introduced a small number of enhanced instructional…