This report is the fifth in a series of annual reports produced by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) providing descriptive information about the schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Following a brief history of the MPCP, this year's report contains descriptive statistics about schools participating in…

The future of faculty development programs will benefit most from a systematic assessment of program goals, a factor often ignored or taken for granted while program process and product are evaluated. (MSE)

The lack of consensus among researchers in defining the focal construct of rurality has led to contradictory conclusions of whether or not a rural-urban performance gap exists in higher education. Compounding this problem are the changing definitions of rural and urban, even among governmental agencies. Thus, this study used two different…

A survey of 49 university and other research administrators investigated attitudes concerning research productivity and measures to assess it. Results are compared with those of an earlier survey of research scientists, including a rank-order comparison of the relative importance of a number of productivity measures. Implications for demonstrating…

This study reports the impact of the Flint Community Junior College (Michigan) reading improvement program on 150 participating students in terms of general group and racial sub-group (black and white) performance. After the groups were compared according to race and ability for data-collecting purposes, pre- and post-test measurements were taken…

The objectives of this study were: (1) to compare retention rates between self-paced (SP) and classical lecture (CL) chemistry students as measured by the proportion of students who received a withdrawal or unofficial withdrawal grade; (2) as indicated by the distribution of final grades, to compare student achievement between SP and CL students;…

Without an institutional research office to look at recruitment and retention programs, DePauw University (Indiana) relies heavily on institutional trend data and comparative information to assess the effectiveness of three initiatives: recruitment of large numbers of minority students, strategic use of financial aid, and use of market…

Two pilot programs designed to improve and maintain quality in European higher education are described and compared: an audit of universities' procedures for quality assurance; and an assessment of programs of study, including teaching and learning, student characteristics, staff, facilities, and quality management. Both include institutional…

This study developed a classification scheme to critically compare performance assessment projects at higher education universities in North America and Europe. Performance indicators and assessment initiatives were compared using nine basic dimensions: (1) locus of control, (2) degree of governmental involvement, (3) focus of performance…

A set of weighting factors on student credit hour production by discipline was developed so that instructional productivity could be equitably compared across disparate disciplines and within disciplines. The new statistical methodology was applied to 3 years of teaching load data from 21 major public universities (the Southern University Group…

This report presents the results of a dissemination project, the objectives of which were: (1) to conduct a set of conferences at several predominantly Negro colleges for the reporting of research results from a study in which these schools had previously participated, (2) to evaluate the effectiveness of these conferences with respect to…

Two frameworks for educational assessment distinguished, which is quantitative, adequate for construing some kinds of learning, and qualitative, which is more appropriate for most objectives in higher education. The paper argues that institutions implicitly encourage quantitative assessment, thus encouraging a surface approach to learning although…

Information on the use and effectiveness of follow-up surveys in four-year and two-year institutions are obtained. In the four-year sector, 55 public and 34 private colleges were included, while in the two-year sector, the entire public systems of four states were compared. This involved 15 institutions in Georgia, 17 in Maryland, 16 in South…

This paper explores the concept of benchmarking in institutional research, a comparative analysis methodology designed to help colleges and universities increase their educational quality and delivery systems. The primary purpose of benchmarking is to compare an institution to its competitors in order to improve the product (in this case…

This document contains two reports on students in electronics courses at Kalamazoo Valley Community College; the first provides student characteristics data as well as students' perceptions of the courses, and the second presents secondary data gathered from various internal college sources. In the first study, 96 students (46.4% of those…