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A workshop was attended by 36 instructors from departments of education in colleges and universities throughout Ohio for the purpose of identifying criteria for teacher selection. The participants sought to determine ways to achieve a fit between the selection committee's values, perceptions, and personality characteristics and the teacher candidate's values, perceptions, and personality characteristics. The focus was on three major screening areas: skill competence, personality characteristics, and interpersonal skills. Three instruments were used to describe the personality characteristics, and interpersonal skills of hypothetical successful teachers: the Scales of Worker Functions; the Successful Employment Profile (SEP), and the Osgood Semantic Differential. The similarity of colleges and universities in their responses to the SEP and the semantic differential permitted the creation of a statistical model to represent the perceptions of all of the sample colleges and universities in Ohio. A summary of the workshop findings describes areas of agreement among the participants on what constitutes a successful teacher and lists six functions that a teacher should be able to perform, at least minimally. It is concluded that a statistical screening model based upon the data collected in this study can be used and validated concurrently using teachers who are already experiencing varying levels of success in the teaching field. (JD)

This report describes research on in-school career development and its consequences for youths' work experiences in the first few years beyond high school graduation. Chapter 1 discusses career development and describes the general framework for the longitudinal study. Chapter 2 describes project design and sample characteristics. Chapter 3 overviews the data organized around these variable groupings: demographic and background characteristics, skills and knowledges, planning and plans (including values), and activities of adolescents and young adults. The final section details analysis issues. Chapter 4 describes the development of six scales indexing and organizing dimensions of pre- and extra-occupational manifest interests. In Chapter 5 six scales indexing and organizing dimensions of occupational values, work routines, and job returns/rewards are described. Chapter 6 examines stability of interests over high school years and whether these interests effect educational outcomes in high school and work values. Chapter 7 addresses the planning process (career decision making) during adolescence; chapter 8 explores content of those plans. In chapter 9 patterns of employment in secondary school and routes to employment are discussed. Chapter 10 and 11 study the routines and rewards aspects of youths' employment experiences during early postsecondary years. Chapter 12 discusses results. Data tables are appended. (YLB)

Using two complimentary data sets, the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 and the Study of Academic Prediction and Growth, the conventional interpretation of educational plans as motives and thus determinants of educational attainment is questioned. It was found that when questioned about their educational loans: (1) as many as 20 percent of youth supply extemporaneous responses; (2) another 20 percent report goals of quite recent formulation; and (3) the remainder report long-term commitments (of at least two to five years). The last are so long-standing as to make suspect the causal ordering used in most models of adolescent attainment. That is, such plans are not properly considered as the products of high school experiences. It is also documented that senior year measures of educational goals are often quite contaminated by prior knowledge of one's actual prospects for college. Finally, the analyses make suspect the assumption that educational plans reflect exclusively, or even primarily, underlying motivation or achievement orientation. This finding makes it difficult to sustain the customary interpretation of the influences of student "plans." (Author/MSE)

This article provides a brief introduction to fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) including characteristics, incidence, current government programs, successful local programs, and implications for school administrators. (DB)