Measurement Areas:

Secondary Data Sources

Department of Education School Report:

The Center for rural studies maintains the Department of Education School Reports, which are provided for individual schools. This will provide extensive base line and impact area data for student performance (generic math and science) comparing the changes in our target schools as well as our target schools to other schools in the Vermont system. Standardized scores are not a widely accepted source of information about the impact of telecommunications in a school program, but they will give us some general figures to work with. This report will be of great utility to this evaluation as it presents solid information about the school context as well as providing class size, enrollment, and attendance figures, all of which can provide basic denominators for identifying the percentages of students involved in classes which make increased use of telecommunications through OTH. Moreover the school reports have budget figures, salaries and number of teachers, and risk factors of the student population. Since these are available annually at our WWW site, these will prove invaluable.

Department of Education Technology Inventory:

The Center for Rural Studies also maintains the Department of Education School Technology Inventory. This inventory contains detailed school level data on computer hardware, software, use and support. Although these data will be checked with participating schools, these data will provide fundamental information for measuring the impact of the program on the school hardware, and on its relationship to other schools. Information such as number of connected classrooms, number of computer labs connected, library/media centers, type of PC, technology budget data (excluding personnel) and so. Again, through on-site checking and by comparison to other documents provided by the schools (the School Telecommunications Plan) these data will be verified. They provide a critical reference point for the measure of changes in Phase I and Phase IV telecommunication's configuration.

Record of Technology Use:

Signatron Technology will provide the evaluators with records on data transmissions for the project schools. These records will include the volume of data (bytes) transmitted and the protocol (i.e. WWW, FTP, E-Mail) that is being used. This information should provide a quantitative measure of change in technology use during the evaluation.

Primary Data Sources