This paper reports on research that was designed to produce a limited number of assessment standards judged by experts as the most important standards in the practice of quality assessment in undergraduate higher education. The study collected the opinions of a group of national assessment experts and employed a modification of the Delphi…

The Center for the Study of Evaluation at the University of California, Los Angeles, collaborated with school site personnel in an attempt to build an on-going, comprehensive, school-based information system useful in instructional decision making and general school renewal. Conducted at a suburban senior high school over an 18-month period, the…

Outcomes of a project that implemented a management information system to effectively gather and record student data are presented in this practicum report. The project, implemented in the adult education department of a community college and its various offcampus locations, consisted of three components: a BASIC program to calculate students'…

After a decade of dormancy there is suddenly a great interest among educators and policy-makers in public school finance, spawned by: successful court decisions in several states overturning existing state public school finance formulas; a popular book alleging more severe educational segregation than in 1954; congressional proposals for school…

Most administrators agree that school improvement and change are needed. Disagreement among administrators arises over how the improvements should be made. Total Quality Management (TQM) is a powerful tool in bringing about change and should be considered as an effective alternative in improvement efforts. The TQM approach is designed to address…

A study was conducted at Macomb Community College (MCC), in Warren, Michigan, to determine whether respondents to studies would be as likely to include their return addresses on business reply envelopes if there were no lines designating the return address's proper placement. From October 25 through November 18, 1993, 23 mailings were conducted…

The General Accounting Office (GAO) examined the procedures used by various federal agencies to monitor the performance and effectiveness of their programs of employment training assistance to economically disadvantaged persons. The study revealed that, although most of the employment training programs had some form of oversight or monitoring…

The inherent methodological problem in conducting research at multiple sites is how to best derive an overall estimate of program impact across multiple sites, best being the estimate that minimizes the mean square error, that is, the square of the difference between the observed and true values. An empirical example illustrates the use of the…

The Family Literacy Project at the Dr. Charles E. Gavin School in Chicago Heights, Illinois, brings together a community college adult education program, an early childhood program, and a local school district. This report of the Prairie State College Family Literacy Project assesses the needs for family literacy among the families in the Gavin…

City-as-School (CAS), founded in 1972, is a New York City alternative high school with a mission to link students to learning experiences outside the classroom. Since the 1985-86 school year, CAS has received federal funds for the CAS Replication Project, the goal of which is to promote and facilitate the adoption of the CAS model by other sites.…

By examining large, computer-readable databases at the federal, regional, and state level, this report addresses the degree to which data collected by the state education agencies can be used to describe the condition of rural education. The states covered in this report are Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.…

This report focuses on the extent of the foreign language teacher shortage, including avenues explored to curtail shortages and incentives for recruiting new teachers or for helping current teachers to maintain or improve their skills. Questionnaires were sent to foreign language supervisors in state education agencies of the 50 states and the…

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has a large campus computer network serving a community of about 20,000 users. With such a large network, it is inevitable that there are a wide variety of technologies co-existing in a multi-vendor environment. Effective network monitoring tools can help monitor traffic and link usage, as well…

Biographical inventory is a selection device used as an alternative or supplement to cognitive testing because this measurement method predicts aspects of job performance that are not predicted by cognitive measures. Some of the issues and concerns about using biographical inventories are discussed. The use of biographical inventories (biodata) is…

A statistical portrait is provided of private schools in the United States, using the best national data available to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Previously published work is used to give an overview of private schools from 1980-81 through 1985-86. Following an introductory examination of private schools in the United…