Increasingly, government, foundations, and others are asking community-based organizations for more evaluation information. Although the demand for this information may be increasing, the field knows very little about the way organizations are responding to this demand. Using data collected from interviews and a mail survey of community-based…

The magnitude of the cultivation effect for perceptual estimates of social reality has been shown to be affected by a number of contextual factors such as source priming and motivation to process information during judgment construction, and these contextual factors have been linked to the use of heuristic processing strategies when constructing…

Principals are anxious to determine which strategies, programs, and other factors contribute to increasing the achievement of English Language Learners (ELLs) so that all students in their schools can experience success. This study investigates the practices, strategies, knowledge, and expectations of an elementary principal that contribute to…

In this comprehensive effort to study Indian education policies, the report categorizes the policies of five Northwest Region states based on 13 key policies identified in the literature and describes the legal methods used to adopt them, such as statutes, regulations, and executive orders. The study found that six of the key policies had been…

College and career readiness has become a unifying principle for education reform leaders across the country. A majority of states have made it a top policy priority, with an increasing number of national foundations and education reform advocates supporting this work. To help state leaders build strategies for sustaining their education agendas…

Libraries devote serious resources to user-education programs and need to measure their effectiveness with hard data. This guide was designed to simplify the evaluation planning process and the making of evaluation instruments. The material was developed from hundreds of survey instruments used by librarians around the country. The handbook…

Presents an "infobase" version of "A Pilot Standard National Course Classification System for Secondary Education" to allow users to browse, search, annotate, print, and export information electronically. This publication is the culmination of a major effort to help establish common terminology, descriptions, and a coding…

This paper outlines purposes of program evaluation and provides practical information to help individuals from a wide spectrum of backgrounds use evaluation to move their program ahead in a purposeful manner. Wisely moving ahead requires an assessment of an organization's past and present as well as an examination of its assumptions about the…

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is a data collection system of the National Center for Education Statistics. The NHES is a telephone survey of the noninstitutionalized civilian population using households selected using random digit dialing methods. Approximately 60,000 households are screened for each administration, and people who…

Little is known about teachers' reflections on current reform efforts in real classrooms (Cuban, 1993). This study describes methodology and data on teachers' efforts to implement a 4-year secondary mathematics reform curriculum at a statewide level. The methodology uses vignettes in an attempt to retain the best part of careful observational…

As part of a high-risk youth grant from the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, the Southwest Regional Laboratory developed and implemented a survey of alcohol sales establishments. The purpose was to assess the availability of alcohol in the community and changes in availability over time that may have an impact on findings related to project…

This handbook is an effort to establish current and consistent terms, definitions, and classification codes to maintain, collect, report, and exchange comparable information about students. It is a reference guide to those concerned with the collection of student data. Definitions reflect a consensus about best practice in the field of education…

Receiving and Processing Information Directly (RAPID) is a directory designed to facilitate the identification of interstate migrant families. The directory contains instructions for using the RAPID notification form, a means of rapidly communicating intended destinations of migrant families. Use of the form is designed to help identify interstate…

Every opportunity should be taken to communicate research findings both inside and outside government programs and make them accessible to policy makers, teachers, lecturers, parents, and employers. The "Interchange" series aims to further improve the Educational Research Unit's (ERU) dissemination of the findings of research funded by…

The Steering Committee of the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative established a Unit Record versus Aggregate Data Working Group in 1996 to identify and assess data sharing methods that are needed to advance the understanding of how postsecondary students are served, and with what outcomes. Most mandated record sharing has been through…