Book Description

The 1994 High School Transcript Study (HSTS) provides the Department of Education and other policymakers with information about current course offerings and students' course-taking patterns in the nation's secondary schools. One objective was to determine changes in course offering and selection patterns since the previous studies in 1982, 1987, and 1990. Another objective was to compare course-taking patterns to results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an assessment of educational achievement nationwide. In 1994, transcripts were collected for more than 25,000 students who graduated from high school that year. These students were from 340 schools that participated in the NAEP. Information in this report documents a significant increase since 1982 in the percentage of graduates completing curricula recommended by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. As of 1994, over 25% of high school graduates are completing programs satisfying the Commission's recommendations for college-bound graduates, and nearly one-third are completing the Commission's core curriculum. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of this report contains highlights of the study results, descriptions of the studies from 1982 through 1994, an introduction to the tables of data, a brief description of subject taxonomy, a discussion of the comparability of samples in the studies, and directions for testing the significance of differences reported in the tables. An error was discovered in the post-stratification weighting of estimates used to report the 1994 High School Transcripts Study data. Throughout the original report the error caused small differences in estimation and sample variance. This revision corrects these differences. Appendix A contains tables of study data, and Appendix B lists study codes for each category of data. (Contains 121 tables.) (SLD)