At a time of tremendous expansion of early childhood services, funds to train the needed work force are almost unavailable outside of the Head Start community. This problem is compounded by the limited amount of attention that the topic of early childhood teacher preparation and professional development has received from researchers and…

This paper reviews social support programs designed to have a preventive impact on young adolescents. A review of supportive programs for reducing adolescents' risks of educational failure and poor health has identified a number of innovative school- and community-based support programs. School-based support programs are aimed at enhanced…

Adolescents at high risk for not making a successful transition into adulthood may become school dropouts, abuse drugs and other substances, exhibit poor problem-solving skills, and display a wide variety of nonproductive or destructive behaviors. An after-school program, Youth 2000 Visions, was designed to assist local adolescents in addressing…

Professional socialization is the process by which individuals acquire the specialized knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, norms, and interests needed to perform their professional roles acceptably. The following interacting domains of potential professional self-growth can be defined as outcomes of the socialization process: self-image, role…

An online library system is an example of a complex computer system in that it supports a variety of users, both patrons and staff, and is made up of many intricate programs with complex relationships among them. Certain features are essential to a user friendly system: (1) users cannot get lost in the system; (2) users cannot enter illegal…

A study to determine the health status of older persons and to analyze the support provided to them by community health and social service agencies in Ohio is reported. As a cooperative effort of the Gerontology Program and the Medical College at Bowling Green University, the project specifically sought to conduct a health needs assessment of…

The introduction of computer technology into social science education in elementary and secondary schools in England stands to inhibit some of the positive developments in these subjects in recent years. Currently, objectives of social science education for the multicultural society in Britain are the enhancement of respect for self and of respect…

The literature on the field of older adults in higher education is fairly new. Until 1975 almost all of it was normative or speculative. With the publication of the first volume of the journal "Educational Gerontology" in 1985, however, the amount of literature in the field increased dramatically. The literature on older adults in higher education…

The monograph addresses the issue of research on learning disabilities (LD) and proposes directions for research in Iowa by means of four articles, a report of a survey of needed research, and six brief response papers. The first paper, "Issues on the Identification of Learning Disabled Children" (S.W. Ehly), discusses the problems of…

This paper discusses some of the issues raised for cognitive psychologists by the computer revolution together with the role that psychologists with computer training ought to play, especially in the study of how people acquire complex skills. The issues addressed include: (1) the competition between humans and intelligent machines; (2) the…

This document summarizes the activities conducted under the National Institute of Education (NIE) planning grant for the new Center on Student Testing, Evaluation, and Standards and the conceptualizations that emerged from these activities. Chapter 1 presents a summary of the planning activities actually conducted under the award, including…

To aid in the effort to define comprehensive long-range planning goals in bioregulation, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) asked the Board of Agriculture of the National Research Council to undertake a study of the ARS research programs concerned with bioregulation. (For the purposes of this study bioregulation was interpreted broadly to be…

This paper presents criteria for establishing the trustworthiness of naturalistic inquiries, and specific techniques to facilitate their achievement or determine the degree of their achievement. The following criteria are briefly described: fairness; and ontological, educative, catalytic and tactical authenticity. Explored in greater detail,…

This paper explores a wide range of issues associated with research on mental models. Based on a functional perspective, mental models are defined as the mechanisms whereby humans generate descriptions of system purpose and form, explanations of system functioning and observed system states, and predictions of future system states. Specifically,…

This document consists of four symposium papers each providing a critical examination of a particular data collection technique in vocational education research. Texts of the following presentations are provided: "Mail Survey Research," by Betty Heath-Camp; "The Telephone Interview as a Data Collection Technique," by James P. Key; "The Personal…