Improved School Management and Planning: The Promise of Computer Simulation. Project Kansas 76: Concept Paper.

The need for planning in educational systems may be interpreted as the need to identify, prepare, and devise new or revised procedures through which explicit systemic goals may be realized. Usually such efforts have a specific time orientation. Planning is further related to policy in the sense that policy is a legitimized procedure or course of action. The logic suggests that planning should precede procedure specification and formal policy action. Computer simulation is a relatively new approach to the study and further understanding of complex entities and situations. The computer program is the embodiment of the real world event or entity of interest. Its primary advantage is the computer's capability of storing, manipulating, recombining, and reporting the past, current, and future states of numerous variables which together comprise the total behavior of a complex event or system. In this sense, the computer exceeds the intellectual capacity of the average person who would experience difficulty comprehending the totality of input variables, interaction effects, and current states of the system. (Author/WM)