DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS

NCRVE's Development activities bring NCRVE's work closer to points of practice. Working face-to-face with practitioners, we facilitate change, learn about the requirements for change, and then spread the word to other sites in the next stage of readiness. As equal partners, NCRVE researchers and practitioners jointly determine the design and engineer, implement, and document innovative activities. Development activities provide us with the in-depth information the field demands for both implementation and the design of policy that best enables change.

Our development sites and their work will provide answers to the "what is it" "how to do it" questions, formative data, and a process for identifying additional issues and questions for further study. With this information we can create and provide richly informed descriptions, evaluations, and strategies. Ultimately, development activities will create success stories, exemplars of policy translation, and will develop a cadre of leading practitioners.

A particular focus of the development work is to provide NCRVE with opportunities to test, refine, clarify, and more deeply understand the reform principles and ideas advocated and mandated in 1990 Perkins Act and the 1994 STWO Act. The central points are (1) integration of vocational and academic curriculum, (2) combination of work-based with school-based learning, and (3) creation of links between secondary and postsecondary education.

We have established the following benchmarks to assess our success in meeting this purpose. Through development activities we will

• deepen and expand our knowledge and vision of effective schools and colleges, gathering descriptive knowledge of programs and the complex implementation processes involved in creation, institutionalization, and replication.
• discover, through evaluation, the validity of our theories.
• synthesize our lessons from research, development, and training activities and therefore improve our ability to serve the field by creating and disseminating information that is more user-friendly.

To this end, researchers and practitioners play a variety of roles in the development of self-sustaining sites and the simultaneous study of reform. For researchers this includes coaching, mentoring, planning, training, evaluating, and developing local infrastructure. For practitioners, in addition to actual innovation, the list includes defining questions and design, and documenting change through data collection or journal writing. Equally important to development is an iterative process, cycling repeatedly between design, implementation, testing the design efficacy, and redesigning again.

Four different types of development activities are funded:

1. Initiatives to form more intensive long-lasting relationships by creating networks that will unite schools, colleges, and NCRVE as we all work toward implementing key ideas articulated in the 1990 Perkins Act and the 1994 STWO Act.
2. Activities which add a development component to NCRVE research projects.
3. Projects that improve NCRVE's capacity to respond to requests from the field for assistance in implementing the 1990 Perkins Act and the 1994 STWO Act.
4. Activities to collaborate with other organizations such as the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) and state departments of education to discover answers to pressing questions from the field.

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