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This study examined the impact of a workforce development program embedded in a health setting on subsequent risk behaviors and educational and employment outcomes among inner city males aged 16 to 28 years old. Health risk behaviors measured included subsequent fatherhood, substance use, and legal problems. Educational and employment outcomes included obtaining a high school diploma or General Equivalency Diploma (GED), completion of a job-training program, and securing employment. The program provided medical care, job readiness training, and activities emphasizing personal and social competency. Major findings of this study indicate comprehensive workforce development activities can result in risk reduction, and educational and employment enhancement among young males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. Bilingual and bicultural occupational health and safety interventions for Hispanic farmworkers are extremely rare and, because of language barriers and cultural differences, issues important to their health and safety on the job remain unaddressed. We designed, conducted, and assessed the first bilingual occupational health and safety education program for farmworkers attending High School Equivalency Programs (HEPs). Methods. We took an interdisciplinary participatory approach by integrating educators and researchers with a community advisory board to guide development, evaluation, and implementation of Work Safely-Trabaje con Cuidado Curriculum (Curriculum), a bilingual occupational health and safety curriculum. We created a quasi-experimental design using mixed-method evaluation (quantitative and qualitative elements) via pre- and posttest comparisons, follow-up surveys, and focus groups assessing the Curriculum effect on knowledge, safety risk perception (SRP), and safety behavior. Focus groups and follow-up surveys reflected success and acceptance of the Curriculum among participating farmworkers under the study's logic model. Results. Completion of the Curriculum resulted in statistically significant improvements in the combined score of knowledge and SRP at the posttest (p=0.001) and follow-up survey (p=0.02) in the intervention group. After completing this study, the Curriculum was permanently adopted by the two high school equivalency sites involved. Conclusion. The participatory approach resulted in integration of community and applied research partnership. The potential to expand use of this Curriculum by other HEP sites can further assess effectiveness and external validity among underserved minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternatives to the standard statewide assessment often are necessary for valid measurement of students with significant disabilities. These alternate assessments must be carefully developed and evaluated with respect to generally accepted psychometric standards. Ideally, these measures should be sensitive to growth and scaled to state tests that are aligned with grade level content standards. In this study, we investigated the technical adequacy of early reading performance tasks for a Grade 3 statewide alternate reading test. Our research hypotheses pertain to (a) equitable measurement function across populations of students, (b) measurement dimensionality and (c) item difficulty. Using test results obtained from annual testing in one state, our findings suggest that performance tasks are adequate for use in the alternate assessment, and they can be scaled in terms of the statewide testing metric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than two decades, many states have required students to pass exit examinations to obtain high school diplomas. Despite these sweeping policy initiatives, we know relatively little about whether such policies are related to the chances that high school students will obtain diplomas. The authors estimate the association between high school exit examination requirements and students' chances of obtaining diplomas, acquiring general educational development (GED), or leaving school with neither credential. They also assess whether these associations vary according to socioeconomic status (SES) or prior academic achievement. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, they found that high school exit examination requirements--at least as they existed in the early 1990s--are not associated with increased chances of obtaining a GED or of leaving school with neither a GED nor a diploma, even among low-SES and low-achieving students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]