In many schools and districts, teacher evaluation is poorly conducted, or even disparaged or ignored altogether. This handbook advocates a new approach to teacher evaluation--a cooperative effort undertaken by a group of professionals. Evaluation can reassure teachers that they are doing good and valued jobs, give security and status to…

The shift away from norm-referenced tests to authentic samples of child performance, such as writing and drawing samples, poses serious problems in organizing and analyzing assessments of child performance. This paper proposes a process utilizing the large-scale storage capacity of centralized mainframe computers and the flexibility and efficiency…

This third edition of "Education at a Glance" presents a set of 49 international education indicators covering the 1991-92 school year. The publication of this set of indicators marks the completion of efforts begun in 1992 to develop a system for collecting, screening, and processing education statistics that would bring together…

This handbook is designed to help educators understand program evaluation processes so that they will be able to carry out evaluation tasks and talk knowledgeably to evaluators about what they want to find out from a program evaluation. The book reviews the purposes and uses of evaluation to help the reader identify the scope and direction of the…

The United States must find ways to improve the quality of education for all its citizens, particularly those young people who are most at risk of failure. This document, the second of three volumes, contains detailed case-study data from 18 schools located across the United States. The case studies were conducted as part of a study that…

This paper describes empirically tested strategies for containing mailed questionnaire costs while maximizing survey response rates. Survey focus, critical to gaining respondent interest and completion of the survey instrument, should be selected on the basis of the theme of the study in order to reduce survey length and yield more in-depth and…

The Board on International Comparative Studies in Education monitors U.S. participation in cross-national comparative studies in education and provides advice to sponsoring agencies. This document results from the Board's consideration of studies that would enrich plans for international studies. What the Board believes to be the value of…

The National Center for Education Statistics recently released results of the 1993-94 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). SASS, an integrated survey of public and private schools, school districts, principals, and teachers, is the most comprehensive survey of the school work force and teacher supply and demand ever conducted in the United States.…

This report presents findings from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System's (IPEDS) Fall Enrollment Survey from 1986 to 1994. IPEDS collects enrollment data from all postsecondary institutions eligible to participate in Title IV financial aid programs although the data in this report pertain only to institutions accredited at the…

Network Science projects are endeavors in which a number of classrooms conduct the same scientific experiment and pool their data using World Wide Web technology. This paper reviews selected findings from research on these projects and describes the recent Web applications that were developed in response to these findings. Findings indicated that…

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is a data collection system of the National Center for Education Statistics, which has as its mission the collection and publication of data on the condition of education in the United States. The NHES is specifically designed to provide information on educational issues that are best addressed by…

Those who study education policy have struggled to understand how money matters in education and why educational research finds no strong or consistent relationship between expenditures and student performance. The papers in this publication were commissioned by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to address the twin concerns of…

The Prince George's County (Maryland) school system has developed a database warehouse system as an evaluation data support tool for fulfilling the system's information demands. This paper described the Research and Evaluation Assimilation Database (READ) warehouse support system and considers the requirements for data used in evaluation and how…

This publication describes an evaluation design developed to assess school-to-work (STW) efforts throughout the Saginaw Valley STW Partnership area in Michigan. An introduction is followed by an overview of the aim of evaluation. Section 3 describes how the variables pertinent to the evaluation of the STW program initiative were identified,…

This report highlights 11 family support programs that are serving one of the fastest growing groups in the United States--the Latino population. The programs described in this report differ from each other in terms of their structures and the types of families and communities served. They represent a range of geographic areas and vary in terms of…