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This paper identifies and describes current and recent efforts at the institutional, state, regional, and national levels to collect individual student data for tracking progress in postsecondary education in order to provide comprehensive information on promising and usable efforts to collect data. This effort was conducted by the Educational Policy Institute in collaboration with the AAAS Center for Advancing Science & Engineering Capacity with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. ; The Educational Policy Institute

Respondent and investigator-based approaches to measurement in survey-type research are described. While the former, based on standardized questionnaires, have dominated sociological research, they are of limited use for the measurement of any phenomena of complexity or emotional depth. It is essential to develop an alternative tradition of measurement based on intensive interviews and investigator-based ratings. Postgraduate teaching needs to concentrate on three issues: (1) ways of developing interview schedules and rating scales; (2) methods of testing the reliability and validity of measures; (3) conveying something of the skills required for interviewing and rating.

This article describes the development of a mobile roadside survey procedure for obtaining corroboration data for the remote sensing of agricultural land use practices. The key objective was to produce a dataset of geo-referenced roadside digital images that can be used to compare to in-field photos for measuring agricultural land use and land cover associated with crop residue and cover cropping in the non-growing season. It was concluded that a very high level of correspondence (> 90 % level of agreement) could be attained using a mobile survey vehicle, as presented in this research, to detailed in-field ground verification data. Classification correspondence was carried out against 114 field sites with a level of agreement at 93 %. The few discrepancies were in the differentiation of residue levels between 30–60 % and > 60 %, both of which may be considered as achieving conservation practice standards. The mobile roadside image capture has advantages of relatively low cost and insensitivity to cloudy days, which often limits optical remote sensing acquisitions during the study period of interest. We anticipate that this approach can be used to reduce associated field costs for ground surveys, while expanding coverage areas and may be of interest to industry, academic and government organizations for more routine surveys of agricultural soil cover during periods of seasonal cloud cover.