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As part of its school improvement effort, AEL, a regional education laboratory, developed the Continuous School Improvement Questionnaire (AEL CSIQ). Staff from the AEL Quest schools program drafted a 65-item questionnaire to help measure and assess the efforts of the project team in their work with the 18 schools in the Quest network. These items embodied the six major concepts of the Quest school improvement program. After review and refinement, 42-item and 117-item versions of the scale were developed and combined for pilot testing. Pilot and field tests provided much information about the AEL CSIQ and its measurement. With data from more than 3,800 educators in 132 schools, the statistics generated have high stability and precision. The testing of the AEL CSIQ in the field fostered its development into an excellent and usable 6-item inventory. The CSIQ was reduced from 147 items with unequal numbers of items in subscales to 10 items in each subscale. The AEL CSIQ was found to be very sound technically. Internal consistency reliability was sound for all subscales, as was stability reliability. The instrument showed satisfactory concurrent validity with another school climate instrument. The items had face validity based on content, and the factor analysis provided strong support for the construct validity of the entire inventory as reflected by the subscales. (Contains 12 tables, 1 figure, and 5 references.) (SLD)

This study was conducted to explore the characteristics of and interrelationships between teacher efficacy and professional learning community in 19 schools participating in the Quest project at AEL, Inc. The Quest project is an applied regional research project that assists schools with educational reform efforts. The School Professional Staff as Learning Community instrument developed by S. Hoard (1997) and an AEL-developed Teaching Questionnaire containing 2 scales (perceptions of external and internal efficacy) based on work by T. Guskey were administered to staff in the 19 schools, with 624 responses received. Based on the Cronbach alpha reliability estimates, it was concluded that all three scales had satisfactory reliability. Elementary school teachers had a higher level of internal efficacy and a higher sense of a professional learning community at their schools than did the high school teachers. High school teachers had a higher level of perceived external efficacy regarding learning than did the elementary school teachers. The results support the 1994 finding of T. Guskey and P. Passaro that the external and internal scales measure two separate constructs of teacher efficacy that have an inverse relationship. Internal and external measures of teacher efficacy were not significantly related to perceptions of the school as a learning community. Teachers' years of experience had no bearing on their perceptions of internal or external efficacy or their perceptions of the school as a learning community. Implications for the design or implementation of Quest programs are discussed. (Contains 4 figures, 6 tables, and 12 references.) (SLD)

A new instrument was designed by S. Hord (1996) to assess globally the maturity of a school's professional staff as a learning community. The Appalachia Educational Laboratory agreed to field test this instrument to determine its reliability and validity and to draw conclusions about its use in educational improvement. The instrument consisted of 17 descriptors of a professional learning community grouped into 5 major dimensions or areas. Faculties of 21 schools (6 elementary, 6 middle and junior high schools, and 9 high schools) participated, for a total of 690 teachers. Some analyses used smaller samples. All five internal consistency reliabilities for the dimension items were in the mid 0.80s, and concurrent validities for the 114 high school teachers scores was 0.75. Factor analysis revealed that a unitary factor of all 17 items accounted for 54 percent of the variance. Results show that the instrument did differentiate the faculties in terms of their maturity as learning communities, and that these differences were evident across elementary, middle/junior high, and high school levels. The instrument appears useful as a screening, filtering, or measuring device to assess the maturity of a school's professional staff. (Contains 16 tables and 22 references.) (SLD)

An electronic survey of a listserv discussion group, the Interdisciplinary Teamed Instruction (ITI) group, was conducted to learn more about the group and to explore surveying electronically. A 10-question survey was posted electronically, as were respondents' replies. Three reminders were posted over the 3-week reply period. The number of subscribers was estimated at 250 in the United States and 6 foreign countries. Twenty-three completed surveys were returned in the first 24 hours, and only 26 more were completed in the next 3 weeks, for a final response rate of 23.6%. Results suggest that the listserv is an active community of learners. They also demonstrate that defining the real population becomes a technological problem. If one were to hypothesize that an active electronic community would respond better than other groups to a survey, these results would not support the hypothesis, although respondents to the initial effort provided very rapid responses. The major implications of the research approach are: (1) to calculate an accurate response rate, it is crucial to determine the exact number of listserv subscribers before first posting the survey; and (2) more efforts should be put into an electronic survey before its first posting, such as announcements. The survey text is attached. (Contains 11 references.) (Author/SLD)

As one of the federally-funded regional educational laboratories, the Appalachia Educational Laboratory (AEL) is committed to assessing the impact of its products and services on a variety of client subgroups. These include educators and administrators at the elementary, secondary, and higher levels. To address the issue of measuring impact, the AEL identified seven impact categories: (1) overall satisfaction; (2) knowledge and skills; (3) information sharing; (4) use in planning; (5) use in implementation; (6) indirect benefits; and (7) secondary clients' use in implementation. Over a 3-year period, the AEL measured impact with a client questionnaire consisting, in the final version, of 5-item subscales that were administered to 672 individuals in primary client subgroups. Scores from this normative group were converted to percentiles, and mean scores were plotted as profiles for subgroups. Results then reflected specific professional roles and the impacts of the AEL on each. An appendix presents the AEL questionnaire development checklist. (Contains 3 tables, 10 figures, and 12 references.) (SLD)

To determine whether the content of the Appalachia Educational Laboratory's (AEL) Regional Exchange, which is published as a regional insert to a quarterly magazine entitled the Educational R&D Report, is geared to its target audiences, a content analysis was conducted on five of the AEL inserts. The research questions formulated for the content analysis were: (1) What categories of and how many educators receive the AEL Regional Exchange? (2) What percent of the articles are geared to those categories of educators? (3) What proportion of the insert's total column lines is targeted to those categories of educators? and (4) What is the average number of column lines dedicated to each category? The mailing list of the Educational R&D Report was analyzed to determine the educator categories used in the content analysis. A content analysis form was then designed and the articles in each insert coded for the educator categories at which they were targeted. Data were tallied and analyzed. The results are discussed in detail and presented in four tables corresponding to the four questions addressed by the study. A set of recommendations for changes in the AEL Regional Exchange and a copy of the content analysis form are included. (JL)