National attention is currently focusing on the issue of general education in American colleges and universities, bringing to light the need for a unifying purpose and idea. Evidence such as declining test scores, grade inflation, and employer criticisms of college graduates have prompted public laments by academics themselves about the erosion of…

A study that used a non-prescriptive, two-round national random sample survey of allied health faculties resulted in an instrument to be used to measure faculty research needs. The Delphi technique, as used, included two rounds; Round 3 was deleted to insure complete anonymity and to avoid opinion molding. Round 1 of the Research Needs Assessment,…

This study examines two types of inservice activities in the Netherlands. With the first, school-focused inservice education, continuing education activities are focused on the interests, needs, and problems directly related to one's role and responsibilities in a specific school setting. This focuses on teachers' concerns and needs as well as on…

Describes results of survey of media service directors at public universities in Ohio to determine the expected longevity of audiovisual equipment. Use of the Delphi technique for estimates is explained, results are compared with an earlier survey done in 1977, and use of spreadsheet software to calculate depreciation is discussed. (LRW)

A total of 33 special education leaders presented forecasts, through a Delphi survey procedure, for the deinstitutionalization of and the residential and education services for the handicapped. It was predicted that the deinstitutionalization movement will not lose its momentum and that community based residential services will become increasingly…

Reports on writing skills business executives consider important areas of focus in business correspondence: logic, clarity, and brevity instead of grammar, diction, and paragraph structure. (PD)

A modified Delphi survey technique was used to delineate diagnoses, management techniques, and procedural skills in seven subspecialty areas necessary for house officers in a primary care internal medicine training program. The self-evaluation approach provided a longitudinal assessment of changes in the confidence of house officers. (Author/MLW)

Presents the results of a three-round Delphi technique study in which predictions about the education, roles, and functions of academic public service librarians in the year 2000 were compiled and analyzed. A table summarizes the predictions by area. (Author/JL)

Reports on Minnesota educators' views of the changes that will occur in secondary education over the next 20 years. Examines possible changes in curricular emphasis and design, instructional design, the nature and organization of the student population, staffing patterns, space arrangements, and time arrangements. (RL)

Using the Delphi Technique to poll 29 experts on declining enrollment revealed a number of ideas about how local school districts, state departments of education, and administrator training programs might approach the problem; two themes--expanded comprehensive planning and more flexible building utilization--were dominant. (Author/JM)

Behaviors of effective experienced teachers, including their cognitive processes, were studied through a two-round modified Delphi study that involved 51 Connecticut educators. Delphi results led to construction of two Likert-type questionnaires completed by 1,837 teachers. The importance of 70 teaching behaviors was ranked with good content…

Used Cultural Futures Delphi procedures to interview and survey a multinational panel of 182 scholars, practitioners, and policy leaders from 9 countries to develop a curriculum geared to the development of world citizens prepared to deal with global crises and trends identified by the panel. Outlines the curriculum. (SLD)

In this paper, we report work undertaken with a group of 11 UK teachers over a period of a year to teach aspects of the nature of science, its process, and its practices. The teachers, who taught science in a mix of elementary, junior high, and high schools, were asked to teach a set of "ideas-about-science" for which consensual support…

Across a variety of disciplines and areas of inquiry, reliable and valid measures are a cornerstone of quality research. This is the case because to have confidence in the findings of our studies, we must first have confidence in the quality of our measures. This article briefly reviews the literature on scale development and provides an empirical…

This article describes a study whose primary purposes were to determine the characteristics of an effective fund-raising program, the marketing practices that contribute to the success of a fund-raising program, and factors of the development system's influence on a fund-raising program. This study utilized a Delphi research instrument. Initially,…