DESCRIPTORS *College School Cooperation; Cooperative Programs; *Coordination; Elementary Secondary Education; *Partnerships in Education

This paper reports on a study examining whether it makes a difference how a university-school partnership is structured and how the partners perceive their level of involvement. Partnership structure frameworks grade from cooperation (least structured) to coordination (more structured) to collaboration (most structured). Twelve schools participated in this study, involving 12 teachers, 12 graduate student fellows, and 12 faculty members. Data were collected using an open-ended protocol, categorized, key-worded, and analyzed. Results show that the graduate fellows exhibited the greatest level of awareness of the collaborative process by taking the other partners and participants into account, offering goals and benefits to the program that would benefit the teachers ' and students ' needs, besides their own. They were aware of differences they had with the teachers and reflected on how to address them. Faculty response to the survey was the weakest, and they did not appear to view themselves as operating in a partnership with a high degree of mutuality. Teachers, like the graduate fellows, had a much keener awareness of mutuality characteristics than faculty. Further research should be done to explore how to improve the level of feedback and formal evaluation from university faculty to teachers and graduate fellows. (Contains 16 references.) (RT) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document