The Agenda Setting Model is a program component that can be used in courses to contribute to students' development as responsible, effective, and informed citizens. This model involves students in finding a unified voice to assert an agenda of issues that they find especially pressing. This is often the only time students experience such a…

This study seeks to determine a definition and appropriate assessment methods of inter-cultural competence as agreed on by a panel of internationally known intercultural scholars. This information is validated by a sample of higher education administrators and can be used by administrators in identifying and assessing intercultural competence as a…

Agencies funding early childhood education projects, policy analysts, and research consumers have created a demand for research tools generating data with applied reliability. This paper examines the focus group as a social science research tool which meets this demand. Part 1 defines a focus group as a carefully planned discussion designed to…

Selected members of the Rural Education Special Interest Group (RE/SIG) of the American Educational Research Association participated in a modified Delphi study to examine the agenda for rural educational research proposed by the Federal Interagency Committee on Education (FICE) Subcommittee on Rural Education. The Delphi technique is a procedure…

Although the major locus of mental health care in the United States is in community agencies, funding cutbacks threaten the services those agencies provide. To assist human service managers in developing guidelines and concrete action strategies for dealing with financial problems, 106 mental health professionals (e.g., agency directors, technical…

Market research, important for professional renewal, is a critical part of continuing education program planning. It includes attention to learning needs and learner motivation to participate in continuing education. Informal market research makes use of internal sources, such as enrollment data, program evaluations, policy statements, and staff…

Six state 2-year technical colleges in Georgia were seeking Accreditation Board of Engineering Technology (ABET) approval for a pilot seven-quarter electronic engineering technology program that culminates in an associate of sciences degree. A curriculum revision project that involved a modification of the Delphi technique and input from advisory…

A study was conducted to (1) identify obstacles to self-directed learning, (2) develop strategies to overcome them, and (3) identify the self-directed learning readiness level of two groups of employees for possible clues in improving self-directed learning in the Phoenix Air Guard. The study used two group processes (the Delphi technique with a…

A standard-setting experiment was conducted in which one group of participants was instructed to refrain from discussing their recommended test standards and another group was requested to report the reasons underlying their recommendations. The procedures used were designed to induce convergence of recommendations, but did not require consensus.…

In order to explore the possibility of basing the Ontario Library Association's (OLA's) professional development programming on systematic needs assessment, a pilot project was undertaken to determine the professional development needs of library workers in Ontario and to experiment with the Nominal Group Technique (NGT)--a means of providing for…

This document reports the findings of a study which used the Delphi Technique to survey the attitudes of a representative group of professionals toward developments in the curriculum, the design of instructional materials, and the use of new technology by classroom teachers at the kindergarten through ninth grade levels. Participants included…

The purpose of a study was to develop a curriculum for the National 4-H Executive Development Institute. The Extension Committee on Organization and Policy approved five 1-week sessions to be held every 6 months for 2 years. A Delphi panel selected items for a questionnaire used to determine curriculum content. Using a random numbers table, a 50…

This paper reports on an unfinished Delphi investigation of the future information management. Too often the personal aspect of information provision is overlooked in the light of the dramatic development of technology. However, behind every technological advance there is a provider whose role it is to source, organize, and disseminate the…

At the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management at the University of Houston (Texas), the faculty and administrators made a conscious effort to take a broad, extensive approach to designing and implementing a fully online masters program. This approach was entered in a comprehensive needs assessment model and sought input from…

In primary and secondary education in the Netherlands, 30% of the schools are public, and 70% are private. Both private and public schools are state funded and must follow the national curriculum. Within this context, schools can develop their own identities and teaching methods. With regard to the identity of public education in the Netherlands,…