Introduction: Mentoring is a central component of professional development. Evaluation of "successful" mentoring programs, however, has been limited and mainly focused on measures of satisfaction with the relationship. In today's environment, mentoring programs must produce tangible outcomes to demonstrate success. To address this issue,…

The effects of data-gathering methods on pragmatic data have been well documented, yet an inquiry into the interactive effects of assessment tasks with pragmatic instruction has received scant attention. This study investigated the interaction between two assessment tasks (e-mail and phone) and two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and…

National background of users may influence the process of technology acceptance. The present study explored this issue with the new, integrated technology use model proposed by Sun and Zhang (2006). Data were collected from samples of college students in India, Mauritius, Reunion Island, and United States. Questionnaire methodology and…

The Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) is sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education and is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. TFS is a follow-up survey of selected elementary and secondary school teachers who participated in the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). SASS is the…

Federal education policy in recent years has encouraged state and local education agencies to embrace data use and analysis in decision-making, ranging from policy development and implementation to performance evaluation. The capacity of these agencies to make effective and methodologically sound use of collected data for these purposes remains an…

The National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities (NDPC-SD) was assigned the task of compiling, analyzing, and summarizing the data for Indicator 1--Graduation--from the FFY 2009 Annual Performance Reports (APRs) and amended State Performance Plans (SPPs), which were submitted by states to the Office of Special Education…

The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) is the fifth in a series of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) secondary longitudinal studies. The core research questions for HSLS:09 explore secondary to postsecondary transition plans and the evolution of those plans; the paths into and out of science, technology, engineering,…

The Individual Scaling with Individual Subjects (ISIS) procedure appears to be a viable implementation of an incomplete design for collecting real as well as simulated data. Applied to a multidimensional set of data, it reduced the number of judgments required by more than half and yet gave the same number of dimensions. (Author/RC)

The Atlanta school system's optical mark reader handles a wide range of student-related tasks. (Author)

Describes a project to disseminate information about effective educational programs and practices to districts, schools, and interested educators in the state. (RC)

The aim of this paper is to show how the noise reduction by signal accumulation can be accomplished with a data acquisition system. This topic can be used for student projects. In many cases, the noise reduction is an unavoidable part of experimentation. Several techniques are known for this purpose, and among them the signal accumulation is the…

Subjects were assigned the task of forming an impression of another person with information being gathered from two conflicting sources. (Editor)

This paper examines various estimates of the Samoan population in the United States and assesses their relation to 1980 census data. Because Samoans were enumerated for the first time as a separate group, because there are no national records of Samoan births and deaths, and because there are no data on migration to the United States or movement…

Two investigations examined whether incentives increase the number of survey returns from former students and whether ideographic characteristics, incentives, and multiple mail-outs influence the perceptions of respondents. Survey responses of 125 (Study 1) and 67 (Study 2) baccalaureate graduates in education were used. The survey included 43…

This section of the "Archiving Methodology" is concerned with the role of data collection contractors in the archiving process. Their role is discussed from three perspectives: (1) the nature of the relationship of the data collection contractor, the project officer, and the archivist; (2) the considerations contractors must make when…