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IN THE NOT too distant past, if you wanted to read a document like the Digest ofEducation Statistics 2001, produced each year by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), you had to go to a library with a government documents depository or order the book from the government. Today, this and many other books, reports, research articles, and other resources are readily available as free downloads on the Internet. And fortunately, many such documents are in Adobe Acrobat format (.pdf files), which means they are relatively compact and print exceptionally well.

Two of my primary teaching assignments are courses in assessment and in foundations of educational research. The primary focus of the latter is teaching beginning graduate students to be wise consumers of educational research. To accomplish this goal, my students need to read a wide variety of material. With college textbooks running from $75 to $100, I have become intrigued with the idea of assembling enough materials in ".pdf" form and literally giving students the "textbook" on a CD-ROM disc that costs only about 30 cents to duplicate. I don't yet have enough material to replace a textbook, but I have found a fantastic array of valuable resources. In this column I will describe some of these resources that I think Kappan readers might be interested in downloading and reading.

Speaking of the Digest ofEducation Statistics 2001, this volume is available at http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/majorpub.asp. Chapter 5, "Outcomes of Education," contains some fascinating data. I was intrigued, for example, by Table 386 - Employment of 12th-Graders by Selected Student Characteristics, 1992. Can you guess the number of 12th-graders who work during their senior year? If you want to know if the "work ethic" is alive and well, just download this chapter. NCES has a wealth of other publications, and the URL above lets you easily access them.

While we're on the subject of the government, I would be remiss if I did not mention the virtual library maintained by the U.S. Department of Education (ED), which you can access at www.ed.gov/about/pubs.jsp. One of the links on this page is to "Educational Research and Practice: Reports and Studies." As an example of what you can find here, if you scroll down this page far enough, you'll find a useful report titled Reducing Class Size: What Do We Know?

Before I go further, I should mention that anyone who reads documents produced by ED needs to remember that the secretary and many other top-level posts in ED are appointed. Thus ED reports and research often reflect the political philosophy of the present Administration. For example, there are no less than 10 reports on this page about charter schools. NCES documents are generally considered to be more bias free, but you still have to be careful. Here are two examples. NCES data on the age of school buildings in the U.S. are unreliable since the NCES has a policy that, if any part of the school plant has been remodeled, then the age of the school is adjusted to the last remodeling of any part of it. An old school with a new cafeteria would thus be classified as a new school! A second example of a statistic you need to take care in interpreting is the number of school dropouts. Students who leave high school and complete a GED (General Education Development) certificate by age 22 are not considered dropouts. You'll have to decide for yourself if this is appropriate.

A third virtual library maintained by the government is the massive ERIC collection. Probably the most useful documents are "ERIC digests," which can be accessed at www.ed.gov/databases/ERIC_Digests/index. The search function on this page doesn't seem to work well, so you may have to skim the titles. A friend recently shared an interesting "digest" with me. This one was titled Loneliness in Young Children. Its ERIC identifier number is ED419624. I had never thought about the topic, so I found it a little troubling. Incidentally, ERIC digests are html files, not .pdf files, though they do print well. Ifyou want to convert them to .pdf files, you'll need a full version of Adobe Acrobat.

Needless to say, ED is not the only source of great downloadable documents. I recently stumbled onto the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement (http://cela. albany.edu). This one was mentioned in the Kappan Web Watch column in February 2002. While there, I found an interesting booklet titled Improving Literacy Understanding Through Classroom Conversation. It's a report on a substantial research effort aimed at "improving deep understanding" of literature. To find the booklet, select the Publications link on the main page, then scroll down to Research-to-Practice Booklets. I am not an expert in either educational psychology or language arts, but there is an interesting section on "scaffolding."

In my quest to find valuable downloadable research in .pdf format, I happened onto a large document edited by Alex Molnar of Arizona State University (wwwasu.edu). Follow these links: Site Index: Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Division: Education Policy Studies Laboratory: Education Policy Research Unit. Believe me, it will be worth your effort to ferret out this document because it contains 13 reviews of the research literature on topics relating to school reform and school improvement by such luminaries as Gene Glass, Jeremy Finn, Gerald Bracey, and Molnar himself.

The Educational Testing Service (ETS) occasionally posts a few interesting research articles on its site (www.ets.org). Two recently released studies are Further Examination of the Academic Quality of Prospective Teachers and An Uneven Start: Indicators of Inequality in School Readiness. If you read the first study, you'll find out how well teacher preparation programs accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) compare to non-NCATE-accredited programs. I think you'll be surprised. The second report should be read by every policy maker in the country.

Speaking of testing firms, Harcourt Educational Measurement has a comprehensive and well-written "Glossary of Educational Measurement Terms" at www.hbem.com/library/glossary.htm. I have used this glossary in my assessment class for years.

Another trusty source of interesting reports is Education Week (www.edweek.com). Education Week publishes two reports annually that are of general interest to educators. These are Quality Counts and Technology Counts. The first contains a state-bystate "report card" on school quality, and the second reports on the status of technology in the schools. The 2002 Quality Counts features early childhood education. Every week, this website also offers a variety of online articles from the weekly newspaper. I found an interesting article in the 20 February 2002 issue titled "Research: Researching the Researchers." The discussion in this article concerns the potential bias in research generated by nonprofit educational think tanks - there are about 40 of them in the U.S. If you're interested in school reform, this is a must-read piece, since most school reform programs are the products of such think tanks.

Obviously, the websites of such organizations as Phi Delta Kappa, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the National Association of Secondary School Principals are other sources of downloadable articles and reports. The addresses of these websites respectively are: www.pdkind.org, www.ascd.org, and www. nassp.org. My informal survey led me to conclude that NASSP has very little online, the Kappan puts about three articles a month online, and Educational Leadership has a large number of articles online. The ASCD website offers "InfoBriefs," and the PDK site has the similar "Fast Facts." I found a February 2002 (Number 28) InfoBrief on "Motivating Students to Learn" to be succinct and up to date. Obviously, among the most valuable resources on the PDK site are the last few annual Phi Delta Kappa/ Gallup polls.

It is most interesting to compare the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) site and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) site. The NSTA site seems to be a lot more liberal in making its documents and standards available online.

The last virtual library I have space to mention here is the vast collection of plain text literature at Project Gutenberg (http:Jl promo.net/pg/). If you are interested in children's literature, for example, the site has more than 250 classics in its collection, including such items as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and A Child's Garden of Verses. Since these works are in "plain text" format, they can be read by a computer.