The use of emergency certification to fill teaching vacancies has increased in many school districts across the United States. Prior research suggests that teachers' underlying motivations for entering the profession are associated with student outcomes, but very little is known about the motivations of emergency certified teachers who enter the…

America and the South seem to have turned a corner on the deep and prolonged recession that started in 2008. The stranglehold it has had on jobs and job prospects caught many by surprise, and it has caused education leaders to refocus state policy on the relationship between career preparation and education. This report provides updates on the…

Career and technical education courses, such as agricultural education, exist, in part, to assist students in acquiring the competencies needed to achieve employability. However, whether the current secondary agricultural education curriculum meets the needs of industry leaders who employ high school graduates of agricultural education programs is…

The academic skills of today's teenagers are diminishing, and are a cause for concern. One of the academic areas in need of improvement is science. The purpose of this causal comparative study was to determine the effect that a science-enhanced, curriculum would have on students' achievement in science. The population for this study consisted of…

Reflecting the growing momentum in support of quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs) as a key strategy to improve early care and education quality, significant amounts of public dollars have been devoted to their development and implementation. In this brief, the authors report on their investigation of both quality rating and improvement…

Non-technical, employability skills are in high demand for entry-level job-seekers. As such, this study sought to describe the perceptions of Oklahoma's animal science industry leaders as it related to the employability skills needed for entry-level employment of high school graduates who had completed coursework in Oklahoma's Agricultural, Food…

"Gauging Progress, Accelerating Pace" is the seventh biennial report to Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states on their progress in meeting SREB's Challenge to Lead goals for education. Each customized state report documents progress on both measurable outcomes and state policies. Through effective policy implementation, the…

Purpose: To validate an 80-item self-report measure, A Systems Approach to Placement: Self-Assessment for Students and Counselors (SAP-SASC), designed to identify critical areas of knowledge, skills, and competencies possessed by rehabilitation counselors in state vocational rehabilitation (VR) agency settings. Participants: 275 rehabilitation…

This report presents findings from the Pilot Teacher Compensation Survey (TCS), which collected data for school year 2005-2006. This pilot collection is a research and development effort to see if it is possible to collect and publish teacher-level data from the administrative records residing in state departments of education. Seven states…

A study was conducted to determine the type of documentation of students' skills desired by employers in the banking and residential carpentry industries. Data were collected by interviews with employers of random samples of banking institutions (thirty-one) and residential carpentry firms (thirty-five) in Oklahoma. Results of the study led to the…

The profession of educational administration may find its best route to a unified improvement by way of increasing reflective thought and analysis of the work, coupled with the recognition of real-life politics that makes negotiation and compromise an absolutely essential part of that development. Data were generated from a survey that was…

This study was conducted to secure adequate data to support the need for the issuance of competency certificates to graduates of Oklahoma vocational and technical education programs. A questionnaire was developed to determine the perceptions of teachers and employers regarding the competency statements and to see if using such certificates would…

To determine the statewide need for and the proper emphasis of a teacher education certificate in the area of computer science, a questionnaire was mailed to 459 Oklahoma school districts. Based on 201 usable responses, results indicate a clear demand for computer science teachers, with a demand already existing at the high school level and…

A project was conducted to evaluate a proposed interior design program in order to determine the marketability (job availability in the field of interior design and home furnishings merchandising) and the feasibility (educational requirements for entrance into the interior design and home furnishings merchandising job market) of the program. To…

In 1990, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) included a Trial State Assessment (TSA); for the first time in the NAEP's history, voluntary state-by-state assessments (37 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and the Virgin Islands) were made. The sample was designed to represent the 8th grade public school population in a state…