School Administrative Staff Research Articles

The television, school, and family project V. The impact of curriculum delivery format on program acceptance

Social psychological interventions have been successful in preventing drug and tobacco use in adolescents, but target audience involvement has not been well documented. Examination of program acceptance is necessary to avoid ambiguity when interpreting findings within and across studies. This report presents results from a program acceptance study of a seventh-grade smoking/drug-use prevention and cessation field trial. The research design is an assessment of two experimentally manipulated variations in program delivery on the program acceptance of all provider and target groups involved. Experimental manipulations included classroom and mass broadcast television demonstrations of social resistance skills against pressures to smoke and use drugs. Three aspects of target audience program acceptance were assessed: participation, satisfaction, and perceived program efficacy. Respondents included the target audience (seventh-grade students and parents), instructors, classroom observers, and school administrative staff. Strong main effects of television delivery on student and parent participation were observed. The findings suggest the usefulness of student homework assignment to view television segments with parents at home as a strategy to achieve family involvement in school-based programs. Both television and classroom delivery separately demonstrated significant positive effects on overall program acceptance with moderate interactive effects on perceived program efficacy. While classroom teacher/observers and school administrators reported strong preferences for the experimental (social resistance) classroom curriculum, acceptance of experimental and comparison (information-based) curricula by the student/parent target audience was equivalent.

Formative evaluation in school-based health promotion investigations

This article is intended for behavioral and biomedical researchers who have become involved increasingly in health promotion research in social settings. It describes how researchers may more precisely plan and profit from employing formative evaluation, which is too frequently more casually undertaken than is summative evaluation. Formative evaluation includes responses from the student subjects of such programs and school administrative and instructional staff, as well as other elements unique to the school setting such as existing curricula and the logistics of time and space. In order to tailor such programs to the unique properties of the school setting, a continual feedback loop should be in place. Such loops can channel both quantitative and qualitative data to the researcher to assist in adapting projects to changing conditions during the course of their implementation. This article presents a case history of the application of formative evaluation drawn from a health promotion project conducted by the authors. It includes as background for this case history, definitions of formative evaluation and an analysis of its costs.

A Search for Talented Pupils

EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS designed to meet the needs of a country's welfare are frequently made an issue of national scope by prominent citizens, many of whom are not actively engaged in the field of ed ucation . These people have, in the recent past, publicized the necessity to search our schools for intellectually gifted children for placement into ac ademically advanced classes. A concerted effort was made by the School Board of Haverhill, Massachusetts, to satisfy this need. The plan devised by the school administrative staff was quite unique in that its search began on the ele mentary level to be carried through on the second ary level and further into higher education. Many colleges and universities had made provision for academically advanced classes on a rather small scale. Some secondary schools devised programs for this purpose, as welL Nevertheless, few school systems instituted programs to survey the entire school community, particularly the elementary level. One purpose of this report is to de scribe the pro cedure utilized by the Haverhill school officials in screening probable candidates for placement into academically advanced classes and finally select ing those who would most likely profit by the pro gram. A second purpose of this report is to provide statistical data derived as a result of the screening process. Administrative personnel decided that academ| ically advanced classes be established for seventh and eighth graders. The success of a pilot program composed of one class in one school prompted this decision. The pilot program was begun in Septem ber, 1958. The screening and selecting procedure for the extended program was inaugurated in No vember, 1959, for classes which were begun in September, 1960o The first phase of the screening procedure was simply to select for consideration all sixth and sev enth graders who scored two levels or more above grade norm on a standardized achievement test in reading, and whose arithmetic achievement test scores revealed a pattern of consistent progress . The Metropolitan Achievement tests in reading and in arithmetic were the instruments used extensive ly by this community. The sixth graders were then to be tested individually for placement into the sev enth grade, and the seventh graders tested for placement into the eighth grade. The second phase of the screening procedure was to administer an individual intelligence test to each candidate. The testing instruments selected for this purpose were the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, 1937 Revision, Form L and M, and the Wech sler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC). Four certified psychometricians from among the school staff personnel tested 226 candidates who qualified as of the achievement criteria (two levels or more above grade norm on a standardized achievement reading test and a pattern of consistent progress in arithmetic achievement). The third phase was to select for still further evaluation relative to health and teacher recom mendation, all those who scored 130 or more on the Stanford-Binet Scale and slightly less on the WISC School nurses provided information which would most likely preclude a pupil from achieving suc cess in this type of program. Teacher recommen dation consisted of an evaluation relative to the fol lowing: 1) scholastic achievement, 2) desire to learn, 3) attitude toward school, 4) emotional sta bility, 5) gumption quotient, 6) probability of success, and 7) an opinion as to whether a pupil will profit by the program. The fourth phase consisted of parental confer ences. These conferences had two functions: 1) to