REL Pacific at McREL, one of 10 Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), serves educators in American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap), Guam, Hawai'i, the Republic of the…

"Accelerated Reader"[TM] is a guided reading intervention used to supplement regular reading instruction in K-12 classrooms. Its aim is to improve students' reading skills through reading practice and quizzes on the books students read. The "Accelerated Reader"[TM] program calls for students to select and read a book and then…

A study of four teacher-evaluation programs--in Tennessee, Texas, Oregon, and Colorado--finds that measures of student learning can be an important source of feedback on the effectiveness of schools, administrators, and teachers. Includes extended description of Tennessee's accountability system that uses test scores in the evaluation of teachers.…

Traces the educational attainment experiences of 245 Pacific Northwest males aged 16-31 hypothesizing a main path of educational success coinciding with Rosenbaum's tournament metaphor. Indicates that though early academic success did not ensure later success, early academic failure strongly predicted later failure, but some unsuccessful students…

"The Achiever" is a monthly publication designed expressly for parents and community leaders. Each issue contains news and information about school improvement in the United States. Highlights of this issue include: (1) Spellings Convenes National Summit on Higher Education; (2) Noble Street: Chicago Charter High School Creates a Culture…

This document summarizes the contents of two comprehensive reports, "Review of Related Research" and "Survey of Beginning Teachers and Their Employing Public Schools." Three types of studies were examined in reviewing literature on research about the needs of first-year teachers: (1) "Teacher Reflections,"…

This report contains the results of a survey of 1,156 Oregon school administrators intended to ascertain what causes them stress and how they cope with it. The first part of the report briefly reviews stress categories, indicating which general areas of administration prove to be the most bothersome. The second investigates specific sources of…

The Oregon competency-based graduation requirements--survival competencies--are motivated not so much by public demands for accountability in the normal sense of improved "efficiency" as by the desire to bring about a greater range of alternative learning settings and experiences. There are two sets of research and development questions…

The revised Oregon high school graduation requirements, adopted in 1972, are an attempt to respond to attacks on the schools and to clarify the purposes of schooling. The uniqueness of the Oregon approach lies in the mechanism for bringing about change in the schools--a radically revised set of requirements for high school graduation. The focus of…

Between 1972 and 1974, Oregon adopted a series of comprehensive State Minimum Standards popularly titled "competency-based education." This paper addresses two types of research agendas that have emerged relative to these attempts to create a statewide reform. The first involves an ongoing research project whose purpose is to facilitate…

The articles of this special issue represent a compilation and extension of reports concerning work in Oregon for nearly two decades, providing the first extended treatment of that work in one publication. They establish the importance of looking at what teachers and schools accomplish, rather than what they do. (SLD)

The technical report documents the methodology of a study reviewing the vocational research and exemplary projects in Oregon, so that successful projects or products may be accessible for transportability to other environments. The three stages of research were: (1) Data collection of information on practices, (2) selection of promising practices,…

This report addresses forces affecting Oregon's benchmark goals for education, recommendations about future measurement of the benchmark, research about best practices for improving these standards, and services and programs involved in addressing them. It describes the state of youth and education in Multnomah County through statistics on…

This report explores state level governance as it is currently practiced in the states of Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, and Washington. After a brief introduction, section II's attention to the evolution of state boards offers a historical perspective of state intervention in educational policy-making, a review of major questions concerning the…

The magnitude of the dropout problem among Indians was illustrated by a study which followed students registered in grade 8 as of November 1962 through June 1967. Statistics were gathered by area, state, type of school, tribal group, and majority-minority position of Indian students in the 6-state area of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, South…