In the United Kingdom in 1977 a national questionnaire survey was conducted by the University of Sheffield (England) under the direction of Frank Whitehead with children ages 10-14 years old to discover the kind and extent of children's voluntary reading. In 1994/95, Whitehead's study was replicated in the context of the 1990s. This report…

This book, in its second edition, is intended as a practical guide to conducting action research in schools--it outlines the process of designing and reporting an action research project. Contending that action research can be used as a powerful tool that can contribute to school renewal and instructional improvement, the book defines and presents…

This paper describes a cross-cultural online writing project in which three English-as-a foreign language (EFL) college instructors in Ukraine, Russia and Saudi Arabia and their undergraduate students participated. The aim of the project was to develop students' writing skills in EFL, to develop their awareness of local and global cultural issues…

This report contains financial statistics relating to public elementary-secondary education. It includes national and state financial aggregates and display data for each public school system with an enrollment of 10,000 or more. This introductory text describes the scope, concepts, sources, survey methodology, and limitations of the data. It also…

This paper is a report on a study of public-school teachers' salaries in Iowa. The general purpose of the study was to better understand how recent teacher-compensation legislation would affect the Iowa education system. Specific goals were to examine the current Iowa public-school salary schedules and salaries across time (1984-2002); to compare…

Community colleges must often analyze and report rates for outcomes, such as transfer to four-year colleges. A single, summary rate may be an invalid measure of its achievement in the transfer goal if the summary rate ignores the real difference in enrollment composition at different institutions. California's community colleges embody a very…

A six week study determined whether carefully chosen children's literature, as an ancillary component to the social studies curriculum, is more beneficial to students than teaching strictly from the social studies textbook. The study's null hypothesis states there is no difference between using the textbook and supplemental children's literature…

The papers were presented at the Social Statistics Section, the Government Statistics Section, and the Section on Survey Research Methods. The following papers are included in the Social Statistics Section and Government Statistics Section, "Overcoming the Bureaucratic Paradigm: Memorial Session in Honor of Roger Herriot": "1995…

This report, the third in a series, contains the results of an evaluation of the definitions and internal consistency of the finance variables used in the Federal State Cooperative System Public Library Statistics (FSCS/PLS) program, and a comparison of the statistics collected for these variables to selected statistics from independent sources.…

This study investigated the effects of student self-assessment on English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students' knowledge achievement and academic thinking. Ninety-four college seniors from the Department of English at the School of Education at Suez University in Egypt participated in the study. They were randomly divided into two groups, an…

This study examined the factors affecting the four-year academic performance and outcomes of 1,249 underprepared students at Prince George's Community College (Maryland). The fall 1994 freshmen required remediation in reading, writing, or mathematics. Subjects were defined as achievers if, by summer 1998, they had earned a degree or certificate…

This paper summarizes results of a legislatively mandated study of the incidence of students with "severe and/or high cost" disabilities across California within the context of the new census-based funding approach (which distributes funds based on the overall census of school-aged children rather than a count of children receiving…

This publication provides a comprehensive overview of work done across all parts of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Each issue contains short publications, summaries, and descriptions that cover all NCES publications and data products released during a 3-month period. Each issue also contains a message from the NCES on a…

When looking at the relationship between individual earnings and schooling, there are potential sources of bias which arise due to individual education choices; individuals of higher unobserved ability or with higher unobserved payoffs from schooling may for instance invest more in education. This paper reviews alternative models and estimation…

Since the publication of the highly influential "Coleman Report" of 1966, researchers have tried to find inputs, such as school quality, that are associated with student achievement on standardized tests, but have found little. This study finds an underlying association between Scholastic Aptitude Test scores and several measures of…